This Trophy Isn't Real Love
by MaritimeSailorsCathedral
Summary: (AU re: Mac's dad's role) When they find James, Mac agrees to work on rebuilding the relationship with his father that he always wanted. As Mac starts acting distant and odd, it becomes clear that it was more than protectiveness or fear of losing Mac to his real dad that led to Jack's worry. Something is very wrong. The truth is worse than Jack could've imagined. (gen)
1. Chapter 1

AU at the end of season 2, where Mac's dad wasn't who he was revealed to be on the show, but rather an operative with another agency. Everything else is pretty much the same, including the person who laid the clues for Mac to find him.

This chapter is mostly setup for the main story itself, so warnings have yet to really apply, but be aware that Mac's dad is not a positive force in his life in this fic. I will provide specific warnings on individual chapters.

(Title from Sleeping At Last's song 'Three'. Crossposted on AO3.)

* * *

James MacGyver has inscrutable eyes.

The first thing Jack observes about his partner's long-absent father is that his eyes are completely empty. There's nothing in them to read or evaluate, no joy, no coldness, nothing to give him an indication about what sort of man James is. Jack has seen this type of look before, on undercover agents, people who have deliberately stripped their own personalities to facilitate integration into anywhere. He's seen it on himself, after too long under, worked hard to make it go away. James' eyes, they're spy eyes, and from the moment Jack meets him, he doesn't trust him.

When he'd thought about Mac's father, about what it would feel like when they finally found him, Jack had always known it would be hard to watch. He's got too much anger for James, the way he'd left his son for all intents and purposes an orphan at twelve, to be at all comfortable with the idea of that man being around Mac again. But it was something Mac obviously wanted, had worked for, obsessed about, _hurt_ over for so long, and Jack can't be the one to try and take that away from him.

So he'd helped. Against his own reservations about what sort of man they would find when they eventually tracked him down, Jack helped. The alternative was leaving Mac to deal with this on his own, and well, that was never really an option.

The day they find him, the day he watches James hold Mac by the shoulders, studying his face like he'd never seen it before - and likely hadn't not as an adult, not in person or up close - Jack makes a quiet vow. He promises himself and Mac that he's going to stay out of it, he's going to keep his mouth shut and his words respectful when he does speak. Whatever his opinion, he can't afford to let his own protective misgivings, his misguided paternal claim to Mac get in the way of the kid building a relationship with his father. If he does, if Jack gives in to the urge to pull Mac aside, tell him he's got a terrible feeling about this and they need to get as far away from James as possible, whirl on James and read him the riot act on exactly what Jack thought of his behavior towards his son, well. Then he runs the risk of losing Mac entirely, and that's not an outcome he can live with.

"Dad," Mac says when he leads the man over, the word sounding foreign and uncertain in his mouth, "this is Jack. My partner with the Phoenix Foundation."

"Jack Dalton," Jack says, smiling politely and holding out his hand. James shakes it, brief and brisk with an offering of his own name, before turning back, pulling his son away with him again, to speak privately.

Mac looks over his shoulder for a moment, gaze anxious and seeking when it locks onto Jack's. Against his numerous misgivings, against every reservation and screaming instinct in his body, Jack forces his smile to remain, and nods. It's a permission, an encouragement. _Go_ , that nod said. _Get to know your old man_. He hopes he won't regret it.

The three of them stand in that courtyard for what feels like ages, though Jack isn't entirely sure how long it actually is, Mac and James maybe thirty, forty feet away from where he waits in the shadow of a well-cultivated tree. A building looms behind them, the physical spectre of the organization Mac's father has been revealed to work for, one that runs parallel to but separate from the Phoenix. They are aware of one another only insofar as they have to be, communicating only at the highest levels, where it seems James has positioned himself just shy of director. An operative just like them, a thought that leaves Jack with an odd feeling and more questions now than he has answers.

If he'd been here in California the whole time, undoubtedly aware of Mac's presence at the Foundation, why had he not reached out? What had kept him away for so long, leaving his only child to wonder if he was even still alive? That absence, bits and pieces of it coming out over the years, how James hadn't even shown up for Mac's grandfather's funeral, it had done so much damage. Jack is hard-pressed to imagine an excuse that would cover the extent of what that abandonment had done to Mac, the scars it left him with.

Some of his questions get answers when Mac sits in his apartment later that evening, an untouched beer sitting open on the side table next to him, restless fingers picking at the hem of his shirt. Jack is dying to ask, to demand to know what James' reasons had been, what possibly could have motivated him to disappear on his child's twelfth birthday never to be seen again, but in the refrain of the day, he holds it in. Restrains himself. Reminds himself that however hard it is for him to watch Mac caught in this situation, this unbalanced culmination of a long, painful story, it's unfathomably harder for Mac himself, and his role here is support.

His role here is whatever Mac needs it to be.

"He said it was to protect me," Mac says eventually. A thread has come loose from his shirt and he's pulling at it absently, a thin line visible on his thumb where the pressure of the thread marks his skin. He's twisting it hard. "That he left. He said he was going through a lot, and his work was too dangerous to keep doing it and be a single parent at the same time."

"Uh-huh." Nice and neutral, no hint of how Jack feels about that, the immediate instinct to point out 'if it came down to this job or you, it'd be you without a thought'. There's clearly more that Mac isn't saying, and Jack certainly isn't going to encourage him to open up by immediately poking holes in Mac's happy ending.

When he does continue, Jack sees that the happy ending didn't need holes poked in it. At least from where he's standing, the thing is already patchy as hell, because what Mac says next makes his breath catch in his throat.

"He also said he… That it made him angry. To look at me. Because I look too much like my mom, and I…" Not usually one for trailing off, leaving ideas of any sort half finished or unexplored, Mac's voice dwindles down into nothing, conflictedness in every line of his face. "It hurt too bad, to see me, after she died."

"That wasn't your fault," Jack can't help but interject, and when Mac glances over at him, it's with a small smile. Barely a quirk of the side of his mouth, eyes soft, but it's a smile nonetheless.

"I know," he says. "He said so too, that it couldn't be helped," Jack doesn't think he'd go that far, but that's not a hair to split right now, "and it was nobody's fault," Again, Jack is gonna silently call bullshit on that one, "it's just… How things were. He said he regrets it, and he wants to do better. Wants us to do better. He said he wants to have a real relationship with me." There's something like awe in Mac's voice now, like he can't believe what he's saying. Like he can't believe that it's happening for real and not just some repeated dream from a lost, bereft childhood.

"So what are you going to do?" Jack keeps his voice neutral when he asks the question, betraying nothing as to what he hopes the answer will be. And he does hope. He wants to hear Mac say he'll be careful, that he'll keep his distance, take what James says with a fistfull of salt and the wits of a trained operative. That he'll take to heart what Riley hadn't, when Jack had been standing here having this conversation with another child of his heart about another poor excuse for a man who'd never done a thing to earn the title of 'father'. _If he's left you before, he'll do it again_.

But Mac just shakes his head, looking at the ground, the wall, his hands. Anywhere but at Jack.

"I'm gonna try it," he says eventually. "I'm going to see how it goes. He seemed sincere when he apologized, I mean…" The shrug is an awkward movement, out of place on a person of Mac's skill level, competence in the world, a stark reminder of how young he is, the uncertainty he carries under a confident veneer. How that uncertainty got there. "What have I got to lose, right?"

 _That's what I'm afraid of_ , Jack doesn't say. _Finding out._

So the next day Mac meets his father for coffee, and the next day for dinner, and for a while, everything seems like it's going okay. Jack misses his partner, aches a bit over the lost time spent together, evenings of movies and weird games on Mac's back porch replaced by working on his car or running on the coast. It's only natural, though, he supposes, for the kid to want to spend quality time with his dad. It's been years, more than a decade, and that leaves a lot of catching up to do.

On top of that, James' organization operates even more in the covert area of things than the Phoenix does, and he's asked for Mac's help with an assignment, a task that would hopefully help them bond and foster trust. It's only natural that, while they still see him at the office, it's become less common for Jack and Riley to encounter Mac when they were off the clock. Even Bozer has reported seeing less of him, commenting around the third week of James' presence that Mac seems like he's hardly been home lately.

It's this same week that Riley corners Jack, and says to him, "That man is bad news."

The assertion comes apropos of nothing, and with a sinking feeling he knows exactly who she's talking about, Jack makes a wordless gesture for her to go on.

"Mac's dad. I have a really, _really_ bad feeling about the guy and I know you do too." It's unusually blunt and unedited, even for her. "I think that if we don't do something, Mac is going to end up hurt."

"Where is this coming from?" Jack asks. "What happened, did he say something to you?"

"What, _Mac_? Say something negative about his dad, who he's _got_ to know we have doubts about? No, of course not. But I was over at his and Bozer's house today when James dropped him off and I… It's gonna sound crazy but I don't like the way he looks at Mac. Everything about him puts me on edge." Riley must read something in Jack's face, because she turns partially away, arms folding defensively. "I know what you're thinking, and this isn't about Elwood."

Okay, yeah, maybe Jack had been thinking it. "Your dad up and screwed off again after promising he was really back for good this time and now you're scared the same thing's about to happen to Mac. The thought had crossed my mind."

"It's not about Elwood," Riley repeats, voice hard. "It's been months, and I'm not saying I'm over it, but- It's not about him. It's about Mac, and hisdad, and this awful feeling I have that something bad is going to happen."

"You said it yourself, he already knows we have doubts about the guy. If he's worried about getting an 'I told you so', he's never gonna come to us if something does happen. You know how he is, he'd get it in his head we'd think it was his fault and never breathe a word. We have to let him make his own choices." Jack doesn't express the other part of what's holding him back, comments about helicopter parenting circling around his head. How he's afraid that if he oversteps and acts like the father he feels like but obviously _isn't_ now that the real deal is back in town, Mac will feel like Jack is trying to control him and finally pull away so far they'll never get him back.

Riley seems to accept the first part on its own, though, which is a relief. The second bit is not a thought process Jack is keen on sharing with anyone.

"I know. That's why I'm here talking to you instead of him. I just…" The unfinished words sound as strange coming from her as they had from Mac. Neither of them are built with personalities prone to letting things go without seeing them through. "It's not about Elwood, but I _know_ what he's going through, and it sucks, and I don't want it to end for him like- I'm an only child. I've always been an only child. Mac is like my brother. My _brother_. I don't want to see him get hurt, not if there was something I could do to stop it."

When he puts his hand on her shoulder, Jack can feel that Riley is shaking, just a little.

"It's gonna be okay. And if it's not, we'll put a stop to it. He's not alone, we've all got his back, and he knows it. Alright?" There's a confidence Jack doesn't feel, embedded into the words, and Riley stares at him hard, eyes narrowed and arms still folded. She's scrutinizing him, looking for any indication that she should keep pushing, insist they do something now, before it gets to 'not okay'.

Jack almost hopes she does, just so that he has an excuse to intervene, to stop Mac and repeat Riley's worries to him, worries that have been festering in his own mind since they finally tracked the guy down. _This isn't a good idea, this guy is bad news, I have a feeling you're just going to end up hurt again._

"I hope you're right," is all Riley says after a long pause, shaking her head and looking away.

Jack feels a little ill. For all of their sakes, for _Mac's_ sake, he hopes he is too. Even if, in his heart and in his gut, he hadn't truly believed a word of it.


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks so much to everyone who stuck through my rocky first chapter - really more of a prologue than anything - and double extra gratitude to those of you who left comments. Glad to know this has piqued some interest!

Clarifying point: Everything is the same as from canon, except that James isn't Oversight and therefore there's no dossier or anything. Matty was fed up with an old colleague's avoidance and was trying to lead Mac to his dad without violating the agreements between their organizations, so finding out Matty knew him was a lot less explosive and extremely upsetting.

* * *

Riley has not spoken to Elwood Davis in six months. This was not her choice, but rather something that happened with the slow slip of an unmaintained field. Silence grew like ragweed until one day she'd looked up and realized that was all there was, anything green and growing she'd been trying to foster with her father hidden beneath a tangled thatch of absence.

It had hurt, to accept that for all his talk of changing and moving forward, it had been so easy for him to let go of whatever place in her life she'd allowed him to have, to quietly fade away. It doesn't escape her that this latest abandonment - the final one, to her decision, he's run out of chances - is so fresh in her mind now.

It's been six months since this, and just one since Mac's father made his own abrupt re-entry into his son's life, and immediately made the top of Riley's shit-list. She can't entirely explain what it was about him, but the moment she laid eyes on the man, she hadn't liked him. She would probably feel a little worse about this if it weren't for the fact that Mac's personality does not indicate a person who received much good parenting to begin with, even before James walked out on him.

As it stands, Riley is perfectly fine with quietly resenting James while maintaining a polite face when interacting with him, for Mac's sake. She's not going to antagonize her friend's father, but that doesn't mean she has to like him, and she's resolved to keep an eye on Mac as things progress. People who've been through what she's been through have a kind of sixth sense about this sort of thing, and every instinct Riley possesses is telling her James, in the most charitable of assessments, does not harbor purely altruistic intentions.

Her explanation of this seems to be holding water with Bozer, sitting across from her on his couch. Mac isn't home, hadn't been when Riley got there, and it was discussion of this that led her to rehashing her conversation with Jack, but to a deeper extent, elaborating and emphasizing her argument. He's been giving shallow nods every so often, indicating silent, almost unconscious agreement with her points. The face Bozer had made when he'd finally seen James again, after knowing him for a few years as a child, is not one that leads Riley to believe he's any more fond of Mac's dad than she is, and that assumption is bolstered by their current conversation.

"And you think the Agency is bad news too?"

When she'd first mentioned the name of the organization James works for, Bozer had looked completely incredulous, and cracked a joke about the CIA. Frankly, Riley would prefer the CIA. The CIA is, at least, a known entity. The Agency, which she does suspect has another name that James merely declined to divulge for whatever reason, is a new factor, a group of people she had never encountered, even in her days as Artemis. It makes her nervous, not even knowing the name, much less what James' role there is. Mac described it as 'one step down from where Matty is at the Phoenix', and the knowledge that this person who makes her so instinctively nervous is in possession of no small amount of power puts her even more on edge.

"We don't know anything about them," she says, in answer to Bozer's question. "I don't trust something until I know, I don't know, anything about them."

"That's fair," Bozer agrees. His eyes have been flickering around the room for the duration of the conversation, jumping aimlessly from Riley's face, to the various eclectic decorations around the house, out the window, and back to her. "I wasn't excited about the first weird spy group I found out about, and that turned out okay, but I'm not betting on batting a thousand here. So, yeah. I'm with you on that. Bad news. The whole thing's _bad news_."

There's something kind of bitter in those words, 'bad news', like he's drawing on more than just the last month when he says them. Which is when it reoccurs to Riley that he _is_ drawing on more than a month, and that he probably has a perspective she doesn't on James.

"What do you remember?" she asks, changing tac.

"You mean about James?"

"Yeah. What was he like when you first met him, when you and Mac were kids?"

Right away, the look on Bozer's face leads Riley to believe this train of thought is not going to be as useful as she would've hoped.

"Gone," he says, voice flat and stony in a way Riley hates hearing Bozer's voice go. He's a passionate man with strong convictions; he talks with an animation Riley has always found endearing. None of that is there now, replaced by cold, energy-less distaste. "Dude was gone, like, all the time. Even when he was home, he was hardly around. I barely remember him at all, and I was over at Mac's house at _least_ once a week. I don't think I could tell you anything about James if I tried, except that he _broke_ Mac when he left, and I don't want to watch it happen again."

Riley nods. Good to know they're on the same page, then.

"What did Jack say when you talked to him?"

Speaking of being on the same page. Riley tries to take in and let out a deep breath without it sounding like a sigh, appearing as an indication of how she feels about Jack's response. She's not happy about it and she's more than a little frustrated, sure, but she's not mad, and she does understand. So she tries to explain it to Bozer in a way that he'll understand it to.

"I'm just scared that he's gonna be too worried about overstepping to do the overstepping that might need to be done," Riley finishes, giving voice to the part she hadn't said to Jack. "I think if it was anyone but Jack, Mac might not listen, and maybe he doesn't want to take advantage of that and that's why he's not done anything yet, but- Look, all I'm saying is he was acting weird enough already, but ever since James asked him in on that Agency project, we've barely seen him and he's barely been talking when he _is_ around. I'm worried about what he may be getting involved in, that he might be too focused on wanting to make things work with his dad to see that whatever he's been working on with the Agency, it's gonna go down a road he doesn't want to be on."

"What, do you think they might get him in trouble, or hurt, or something? Like, whatever he's working on for his dad, it's more dangerous than James is telling him it is?"

Before she is able to respond, Riley's phone starts buzzing in her messenger bag, discarded on the floor next to the couch. Moments later, Bozer's chirps from the kitchen counter. Exchanging a look, they both go for their respective phones to check the messages they're already pretty sure they're aware of the contents of. Sure enough, true to Riley's assumptions, it's a summons from Matty. They've got an assignment.

There's a moment where Riley sees Bozer turn towards the hall down which lies Mac's room, mouth opening slightly like he's about to call his roommate's name, summon him so they can carpool in. She watches his face change when he remembers that Mac isn't home, an embarrassed cringe followed by a shake of the head.

"He'll meet us there," she says over the back of the couch in an attempt to lighten the mood.

"His car's in the drive," Bozer mutters, moving around the living room to grab his bag. "James picked him up this morning."

"Oh. Well." That's one of Riley's less sensical complaints about James, the fact that he always seems to be picking Mac up or dropping him off, never meeting him somewhere or letting Mac come to him. It's not a generally foreboding action, driving your son places, but something about it makes Riley feel uneasy. There's nothing about James that _doesn't_ make Riley feel uneasy. "I'm sure James will drop him off or something."

"Right." The tone of his response indicates Bozer is not especially fond of this trait either, though it could also be he's just as unimpressed with all of James' behavior as she is.

Mac gets there late.

There's a tension in the room prior to his arrival, an uncomfortable silence hanging in the air when it's been long enough that Jack has checked his watch three times but not long enough for calling him to be anything less than an overreaction. Riley is sitting on the couch, messing with a program on her computer that needs updating just for something to do, while Bozer sits next to her stringing paper-clips from the salad bowl on the table together. Matty has a file she's not reading open in her hands. Jack is standing somewhere near a window, radiating apprehensive energy.

Twenty minutes after Riley and Bozer's arrival, Mac walks in the door of the war room. Under Riley's scrutinizing gaze, he looks flustered, a little embarrassed.

"Sorry," he says, out of breath. "Dad had a thing, and we had to… Sorry."

"It's alright," Matty says, voice brisk and neutral, moving right along. "If you'll have a seat, we can begin the briefing."

Jack has made his way over, next to the couch, and Riley sneaks a look at him as the briefing begins. He's got his arms crossed and if he thinks the worry on his face is subtle, it isn't subtle enough that Riley doesn't see it. She looks away from him and over to Mac. Her friend looks okay enough, focused on what Matty is saying, but there's something off about him, something that's been off for a while. She can't quite figure out what it is, but he seems stressed.

( _Of course he's stressed_ , Riley thinks. _His dad, who left him pretty messed up when he was a kid, reappeared in his life and he's spent the last month constantly in the guy's company._

She'd been there, and she'd only seen Elwood sporadically. If she'd spent as much time with him as Mac was presently spending with James… She can only imagine what kind of a conflicted mess she would be. Add that to the fact that he's evidently known where Mac was the whole time, that he knows Matty, and well. Stressed hardly covers it. Riley's having a hard time even understanding why he's trying, but she figures she isn't in much of a position to judge that.)

The mission is going to take them out of the country. Riley realizes on the plane that this is the first mission of that sort that they've been on since James entered the picture. It's not the hardest one they've ever been sent on, a retrieval of a dignitary who'd landed in an unfortunate spot. Bozer is there for more mission practice, still being relatively new, and she's along for tech support. There's not a lot of prep to do, at least not on her end, which leaves Riley a lot of time to watch Mac.

Since they've left for the plane, Mac has seemed different. His posture has relaxed, the odd look in his eyes has faded, and he's talking more. Whether it's the calming effect of settling back into routine, returning to the familiar motions of a job well known and well practiced, or the more conspiracy-theory tinged guess that it's the relief of knowing he won't even have to think about James for at least a handful of days, Riley isn't sure. Whatever the cause, Mac seems a hell of a lot more like himself now than he has since James' reappearance. The only vestige of his unsettled demeanor is the way he seems to be sticking closer than usual to the others, particularly to Jack.

Presently, he's sitting next to Jack on the plane's couch, leaning against his partner's shoulder to read the dossier open in the older man's hands. It's yet another small example of out of character action from a guy who's usually barely capable of accepting physical reassurance, never mind seeking it, and Riley frowns.

When Jack gets up to go speak to the pilot, he brushes a hand over Mac's hair, giving the back of his neck a brief squeeze. It appears to be a moment of thoughtless, casual affection, characteristic of a man like Jack, as free with such affection as he is with good old Texan aphorisms, but Riley knows it means he's noticed too and acted accordingly. Mac watches him go with an odd look on his face, like the contact had both confused him and left him wanting it back when it was gone.

Riley's heart aches, because she knows what that feels like. She's been there before, feeling turbulent and unmoored, alone in an isolated struggle you can't talk about, and suddenly receiving comfort you hadn't known you wanted or needed. She can imagine how Mac is feeling in the wake of that - hardly able to articulate why it had helped and completely incapable of asking for it back.

That's part of Jack's persistent encouragement to the two of them to tell him when they need something that Riley's never understood. What are you supposed to say?

 _Will you please sit here and hold my hand or put your arm around me in full view of our whole team, because there's something going on with me that I can't talk about, and I'm struggling, and being touched by people I feel protected and safe around helps me feel grounded and like I don't have to deal with it alone._ Yeah, no. Riley can't imagine having the nerve to anything of the sort, nor can she imagine Mac doing so. She of all people knows that progress made in accepting support is not progress made in asking for it, and besides, they have a mission to focus on.

The mission is as comparatively short and simple as promised, and Mac outperforms himself, completing his objectives and handling the few unexpected curveballs with a skill and precision that somehow, after as long as they've been working together, still takes Riley by surprise. It's Mac completely in his element, on top of his game, and it leaves Riley feeling both intimidated and proud to know him. He looks at home in his own skin, twisting a stripped cord from a lamp around the internal parts of a control panel, connecting pieces in order to trick the security system into opening a biometrically locked door. Riley notices the dignitary they're here to retrieve watching this with bewildered awe, and feels somewhat like she'd imagine the family members of pro athletes feel after a big win.

 _That's right_ , she thinks, chest tight with pride. _That's our Mac._

As soon as it's over, though, and they're crossing the tarmac to board the plane, Riley notices it again. Mac's got a distant look on his face and he's walking close next to Jack, close enough that their arms periodically brush, and Riley sees Jack shooting him concerned looks. On the plane, Jack has gathered Bozer over with the dignitary to review what's happened, give him some debriefing practice, which leaves Riley alone at the other end of the aircraft with Mac. She gets up eventually and moves seats, sitting down across from him. Once seated, she reaches out and taps his ankle with hers, getting his attention.

"Wanna go to the pier tomorrow?" she asks, rather than getting right to the point. Riley can't imagine 'are you okay' would've yielded useful results. "I want to try that new gelato place Bozer told us about."

"Sorry Riles," Mac says, with an apologetic wince. He looks reluctant to explain further, but elaborates nonetheless. "I'm meeting my dad for… We've got a thing."

 _We've been on this plane for thirty minutes_ , Riley bites back saying. _How can he have already gotten you to agree to meet him tomorrow?_

"More Agency stuff," she guesses, and he gives an uncomfortable nod. "Is that a good idea? That soon after a mission?"

Mac responds with the least reassuring shrug Riley has ever seen, which is saying something, given a shrug is not the most reassuring of gestures to begin with.

"This Agency thing," Riley can't help but add, unable to stop the stone rolling down the hill once she's pushed it. "You know what you're doing, don't you? You're not gonna get in over your head with them. And if you are, _tell us_ , and we can pull you out, okay?"

The look on his face when Mac makes eye contact with her is chilling. It's blank, completely blank, schooled and controlled until nothing was left. All except his eyes. His eyes, they're exhausted, they look as tired as if he'd not slept in a month. Not slept since James.

"It's just a favor for my dad," he says, voice as neutral as his face is. "It's nothing to worry about."

"I know you better than that, Mac, something is up with you." The accusation, it's a risk, but the stone keeps rolling. "You might not be ready to tell us yet, but when you are, just- You can, okay? Whatever it is, you know you can talk to me, right?" It had been a Hail Mary pass, no practical chance that he would crack and spill everything that's going on with him just like that, but Riley can't help but still feel her heart sink when he answers, voice engineered into artificial reassurance, soft and calming while lacking anything real.

"Thanks Riley," Mac says, with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes, "but it's nothing. I'm fine."


	3. Chapter 3

Thanks so much for your continued support, I'm having a great time writing this, and I hope you're enjoying reading it! If you've got theories, or are excited for the next chapter, or just having a good time, drop me a line and let me know, I'd love to hear from you!

* * *

In the foggy, sepia tinted haze that is a person's time in elementary school as viewed from the perspective of a twenty-something, there exists a memory version of James MacGyver. Bozer has been wading through this miasma of indistinct recollection, some forgotten and some fabricated from external retellings of events he doesn't have a clear view of himself, trying to find that version. Even compared to the usual dreamlike quality of childhood memory, James is frustratingly difficult to pin down. Bozer is growing increasingly unnerved by just how little he remembers of Mac's father. He looms like an indistinct background figure, unclear and fleeting, when he appeared at all.

Since Riley had asked, Bozer has been trying to remember. He's been wracking his brain for any way to describe James, and has been coming up mostly blank. What he'd said to begin with stands - the best way to describe James as Bozer had known him in elementary school is 'gone'.

Bozer can remember, among a crowd of things he can't, how James had seemed like a hologram, to his sci-fi obsessed, childish mind. An image of a man with no substance, a face with nothing behind it. A few times, caught up in what his mother described fondly as an 'overactive sense of magic', Bozer had speculated that this was why, at a contrast to his own effusive, warm household, he hardly, if ever, saw James be affectionate with his young son. If he'd touched Mac, Bozer had reasoned, and he was a hologram, his hand would've passed straight through.

Of course, the man hadn't actually been a hologram. Growing up and grounding perception in material reality had made it all somehow make even less sense than that.

Then, of course, metaphorically gone had become literally gone, and that's when Bozer had started to hate him. James.

It was an anger that lasted, which was unusual for him. Bozer felt things immediately and strongly, but rarely lastingly. He'd held onto his anger at Mac for hardly any time at all before rationality and empathy caught up to him with an explanation and an understanding. Bozer can count on one hand the instances in his life where a turbulent explosion of caustic, pulverizing emotion blew a hole in his chest that never quite sealed. This is one of them.

It's been two months now, and the hope Bozer had that soon things would return to an equilibrium is fading fast. Mac is still spending large chunks of his time at his father's house or at the Agency. Bozer had worried it was too much too soon - going from no contact to _that_ had to induce some kind of whiplash - and that concern persists. Maybe James is trying to make up for lost time by cramming a decade into two months, but for reasons both in the interests of his friend and those of the more selfish variety, Bozer doesn't like it.

On one hand, Bozer has to wonder how much of the time they're spending together and the work Mac is doing for the Agency is really because Mac wants to and how much is an attempt to make James happy, prove him proud. How much is just for James' benefit, just James seeing an opportunity and taking it and not thinking about whether or not Mac feels like he _can_ say no. On the other hand? Bozer misses his friend. Sure they work together, and it'd be hard to never see someone you live with, but it's been a while since they've merely spent time together for the hell of it. Bozer knows the others miss him too, and they _don't_ have the luxury of seeing him when he gets home at night.

Just as he's thinking this, there's the sound of a key turning in the front door, followed by the door opening. There had been no crunch of gravel, no indication that a car barked before the man approached the house. James must have dropped him off at the street.

"Hey, man," Bozer directs over the back of the couch, where he's been halfheartedly watching Battlestar Galactica reruns for the better part of two hours.

Mac stops where he's headed immediately down the hall to his room when he hears the greeting. Which is reassuring, because it means that, whatever is going on with him, it's not taken up so much of his mind that he's just fine with being rude to his friends. He stops and smiles a hologram smile and offers a greeting of his own.

"Hi, Boze."

That's as far as the conversation gets. Mac disappears into his room, and as he goes, the smile disappears. He's hiding, closing himself off from the rest of the world. Bozer has seen him do this since they met.

Mac fractured his wrist, when they were ten. Bozer was with him when it happened, when a mishap resulted in a fairly serious injury and Mac took off. In the moment, Bozer had assumed he'd been running to James, the way an injured child instinctually runs to the arms of a parent, but when he'd followed, he'd found Mac had run straight to his own room. It had freaked Bozer out, seeing his friend sitting on the ground next to his bed, wrist clutched close to his skinny chest, heaving with airless sobs of pain. Not knowing what to do, he'd run out of the house and down the street to his own, shrieking for his mother and father to come help.

James had been in the garage the whole time. He didn't know what had happened until Bozer's father had gone to tell him.

In the years since adulthood, Mac has made progress in this respect. He's gotten more forthcoming, begun to run _towards_ his family rather than away from it when he's hurt, and Bozer is glad for this. He's eternally, unspeakably grateful to Jack for the part the older man has played in this, the effect of a paternal presence in Mac's life constantly reminding him that there's nothing wrong with needing help doing much to counteract the effects of the cold man who'd raised him - for a given definition of 'raised'. Since James' return, though… Bozer can see old patterns emerging, and it's just another stone of anxiety in an already mountainous pile.

Not willing to just let that happen when there's something he could potentially do about it, Bozer gets up off the couch and walks down the hall towards Mac's room. He's halfway there before he realizes that in his hastily made decision he hadn't really factored in what his excuse for pulling Mac out of his self-imposed isolation was going to be. Standing by the door with his hand raised, ready to knock, Bozer's stomach abruptly growls, providing him with the perfect justification.

He knocks lightly, then calls through the door, "Hey, I'm ordering delivery from that Chinese place, should I grab your usual?"

There's a beat of silence, and Bozer is mostly expecting to be turned down, a muffled 'I'm not hungry' or 'I already ate at dad's place' to rebuff him as kindly as possible. The eventual culmination of the pause takes him by mild surprise.

"Sure," says Mac's distant voice through the door. "That'd be great, thanks."

Bozer thumps the door with the side of his fist in acknowledgement, then heads back into the living room, already dialing his phone.

In the interim between calling their usual Chinese place and the food arriving, Bozer makes absolutely no progress in figuring out what magic words he's going to say to Mac to get him to open up and explain what's going on. He gives up part of the way through and figures he'll take a leaf out of Mac's book and improvise. Whatever direction the conversation goes in, he'll figure it out. Bozer may not have quite the experience honed skill the others do with his new profession, but what he does have to his credit here is a lifetime of experience with Mac.

Ostensibly having heard the door open and the brief exchange of voices when the delivery kid showed up, Mac comes out of his room without Bozer having to go get him. He's setting forks and plates out when Mac gets there, though they both know they're going to eat straight out of the box. It's a facsimile of adulthood they won't actually be utilizing but makes them feel better nonetheless. Mac settles onto the couch and silently accepts the box handed to him. The look on his face, opening it and seeing his favorite from this particular place, is a kind of bruised gratitude, a hint of surprise, like he's somehow _still_ taken aback that his roommate, his best friend of more than half their lives, remembers something like that.

Bozer eats wordlessly, eyeing Mac every so often, until the blond pushes a short breath out his nose and sets down his food.

"Just say it, if you're going to. You're giving me a headache." The words are clipped and a stonier tone than Mac usually takes, especially with Bozer.

"Alright," Bozer answers. "Mac, I know you've got a lot going on, but this is more than just stress. You're off your game, you're acting weird. You know I've gotta ask. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

It's the answer Bozer had expected to get, and he isn't phased by it in the slightest. Neither, though, does he just let it go. It's been two months, and he's done letting it go.

"No you're not. Man, I _know_ you. I know you 'fine'. This…" Bozer waves a hand at Mac's general person, encompassing his defensive posture, avoidance of eye contact, everything the past eight weeks has wrought. "This is not you 'fine'."

For a long, torturous moment, Bozer holds his breath. He waits for Mac to get up and walk back to his room, to shutter and snap at him, to double down and say it again, his least favorite phrase in the English language, I'm fine. It doesn't happen. Any of it.

Mac leans over and picks his takeout box back up again, sticking his fork back in it.

"I'm having a hard time," Mac says, still without looking at him, "with the work he has me doing for the Agency."

 _The work he has me doing_. Maybe it's nothing, maybe Bozer is making too big a deal out of something that doesn't actually have a deeper meaning, but he has a feeling that's not the case. If there's anything he's learned, working for the Phoenix, studying Mac and Jack and Riley and Matty, training at spy school, it's that there's meaning in the smallest thing, especially in words. The way someone says something, it means everything, and Bozer doesn't like what it could mean, 'the work he has me doing'.

"What's he got you working on?" Pushing has got him this far, he figures it might take him a step further.

"I can't tell you." Before Bozer can respond, Mac actually looks at him, putting up a hand. "No, I mean, I'm not _allowed_ to tell you. I wish I could, believe me, but… It's a big project. Lot of things on the line." A particularly forceful stab into the box, mutilating the contents without eating any more of it. He's looking away again, back at the fork. "Lot of people on the line. They didn't want me on it, I'm not one of them, but my dad… Pushed. Got them to agree to read me in."

"That's…" Questionable. Alarming. Scary as hell. "That's something."

"Yeah," Mac snorts. "It's something alright. So I'm tired, Boze. I'm tired, and I can't back out, and… It's a lot of lives. So no, you're right, 'fine' is probably not an accurate descriptor right about now."

"How much longer is it gonna go for?" _How much longer am I gonna have to worry about you every time you walk out the door? Well. More than I already do_.

Mac shrugs. "Don't know. Dad doesn't know either. It's gonna happen soon, but we don't know how soon 'soon' is, so until then it's… It's a waiting game. Every time something changes we have to redo the whole plan and I- I wish I could talk about it, I promise, because I could use you guys on this one, but I can't. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, you're just helping your dad. We just… We're worried about you, Mac." Honest begets honesty, and Bozer figures Mac is owed some reciprocity. "You cancelled on Jack twice last week, you know how he gets when you're in trouble, and Riley's half convinced the Agency is some kind of evil syndicate. You should talk to them, tell them what you told me at least, even if you can't say anything more. Just. Tell them _something_. Okay?"

To his credit, Mac doesn't make any promises he can't keep. He just sighs and shifts on the couch, refusing to look up. Bozer expects it to end there, for them to finish their dinner, maybe watch an episode of Battlestar or Quantum Leap or something, retire to their rooms and not speak of it again. In the least predictable turn of events, completely without prompting, Mac speaks again. His voice is halting and weird and his shoulders are drawn in like he's regretting it even as the words leave his mouth, but he speaks.

"It's not just the Agency. It's… Things are not…" He shakes his head and continues to poke at the takeout container with his fork. He's staring into the box like the answers are all in there, and Bozer stays quiet. Somewhere in the half-eaten food, Mac must find the end of his sentence, because he finishes it, voice quiet and awkward. "Things are not... _easy_. With my dad." A snort, a shake of his head. "Things are pretty hard. Actually."

Fifteen year old hatred pulses in Bozer's heart, writhing and alive. He swallows it down and plasters on a neutral look and thanks spy school for his poker face.

"Hard how?" He's not pushing any more. The question is an allowance. An open door, an invitation. _It's okay. You can talk to me_.

"Just… It's _hard_." With a frustrated shake of his head, Mac pulls further in on himself. He looks so tightly coiled he might snap and unravel at any second. "I don't know how to talk to him. I don't know what he wants from me, and I know he wants _something_ , and I- I don't-"

The fork has jabbed all the way through the box now. Bozer moves, getting up from his side of the couch and taking the container away from Mac. He sets it on the table and sits back down, closer this time. Close enough that his knee brushes Mac's shin and he feels the shiver that runs through him, just once, followed by long seconds of stillness, then again.

"It's just stupid family stuff. He's not… _He's_ not easy. I thought it would be different, but it seems like he's just more… I don't know. It's hard."

"Right," Bozer murmurs. He waits for Mac to continue, to open up further, explain exactly what was going on with his dad, what he means by 'what he wants from me'. This thing with James, whatever it is, it feels different than the Agency. More than just some assignment. But whatever it is, Mac is done talking, and they finish their dinner in silence.

When Bozer gets up in the morning, Mac is already gone, and there's a note on the table.

 _Meeting with Dad before work. See you later today. - Mac_

Bozer picks the note up, studying it. The handwriting is perfect. Pristine. Not a quiver or a mis-stroke anywhere in the ten short words. He crumples the note and throws it away. It lands on top of the destroyed takeout box that Mac had pushed a fork through the night before, and Bozer tries to tell himself that it'll be over soon, the mission Mac is helping the Agency with will end, and it'll all go back to normal.

Soon.


	4. Chapter 4

I hope you're ready for things to start picking up and for some questions to start getting answered! Warnings start applying at this chapter though. You're welcome to skip them if you want to avoid spoilers, but beginning author's note will now contain content warnings for potentially upsetting scenes.

Sorry for the length, too, this one got away from me a bit. Let me know what you're thinking!

(warning: emotional/psychological abuse)

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Things aren't so bad, at first.

That initial reunion, distorted like a windowpane some careless glassworker allowed a bubble of air into, is warped and surreal. James hugs him, somewhere in those first ten, fifteen minutes. It's brief and light, hardly a moment, over before Mac has the chance to recognize the gesture, nevermind decide whether or not to reciprocate. He's not entirely sure the hug even happened, it was over that fast, and he'll wonder, nights on after, if he'd imagined the whole thing.

After all, he can't remember the last time James had hugged him, before he left. He'd tried, but he couldn't. The memory just isn't there, and Mac hardly knows if he can trust this one now.

Having James standing there, Mac can't figure out how he feels about it. His whole world's been turned onto its head, and he's functioning on autopilot, unable to stop staring at his father, unable to force out any of the questions he's had spinning in his head for so long. Across the courtyard, Jack is watching them, and he's got what he'd describe as 'capital 'O' Opinions' about James' presence, if the look on his face is anything to go by. He keeps those Opinions to himself, though, shaking James' hand and giving Mac an encouraging nod when he'd turned back, asked silently if it was okay, if it was _right_ to leave with this man he hadn't seen in a decade and a half.

A conversation had followed, and it hadn't been a pleasant one. James' excuses were age-old and well-worn, things Mac has heard on television and in movies over and over, whenever someone's disappeared father was put on the spot to explain himself.

'I did it to protect you,' James had said, and that was predictable. It's what followed that Mac has a hard time with, the part where James had admitted it wasn't his jobhe'd been protecting his child from. Those words, they're the ones that send a chill up Mac's spine, leave him reeling. As James describes the anger he'd felt, the way he couldn't bring himself to look at his son's face without fearing the uncontrollable specter of his own fury, Mac feels something building in his chest, a tight, hot-cold sensation that leaves him sure he's about to explode if he doesn't get out of here now, now, _now_.

So he says, "I have to go," and before either of them know what's happening, he's out of the house, on the street, in his car and driving away. Mac doesn't even register that James has left the house, is standing on the porch saying something, before he's halfway down the street, and by then it's too late to turn back.

Mac ends up sitting in his car on a familiar street, looking at Jack's apartment building and locked in an internal war about whether to go inside. He sits there for what could have been three minutes or three hours, for all that he's processing with any degree of accuracy, and just looks at the light he can see on in Jack's living room. He can't imagine what kind of a reaction Jack would have to hearing how James had all but said 'it was your fault, I left because of you', and Mac can imagine even less what it would feel like to repeat those words, to explain out loud what reasons his father had given for leaving him all those years ago. So he turns around and goes home, and then goes back to see James again when the man calls.

James elaborates this time, says it wasn't that it was Mac's _fault_ , it was nobody's fault, it was just something that happened, the last piece of a tragedy that couldn't be helped, it was just how things had been. He'd go back and undo it if he could, and Mac doesn't know whether or not to believe him. Half of him wants to yell out every bit of anger he's held inside him since he was twelve years old, every bit of hurt James left him with. The other half wants to forget any of it ever happened and accept every excuse, just so he has the do-over he always wanted, a chance at the family he'd thought he'd missed his shot at entirely.

"So, what'll it be, son?" The endearment stings in a way Mac can't describe, arrests his breath in his throat when James says it. "Will you let me have a second chance? Will you at least try?"

Yes. No. Yes. No. They replace each other in his mouth before either can get out, and the best Mac can come up with is maybe, is 'I don't know yet, I don't trust you, but I wanted you to love me so badly, _want_ you to love me so badly'. Either way, Mac can't seem to tell up from down, and he needs time, space, the ability to sort through everything he's feeling before he tries to give an actual answer.

When he turns to leave again, to take that space and get some perspective, James' hand seizes on his arm, fingers catching ahold of the sleeve of Mac's jacket and halting his movement before he can take a single step towards the door.

"Please," James says, and his voice has gone desperate, his eyes beseeching. " _Please_ , son. Let me get to know you."

Half because he's relented, half because that grip James has on his jacket is driving panic up in him like heartburn and he'd do just about anything to get some _distance_ , he says, " _Okay_. Okay, we can try."

James lets him go, then, and Mac almost chokes on the relief to have the man's hands off him. It's all he can think of, the entire time James has that grip on his arm, "My job isn't what I was protecting you from."

But then it settles, and things aren't so bad. A little weird and a lot uncomfortable, but not too bad.

When James breaks his silence about the organization he works for, it's with an invitation. He's been recalcitrant up to that point, unwilling to elaborate either on his role within the Agency or on the Agency itself. Mac knows that he and Matty worked together, a long time ago, and that there's some kind of a relationship between the Agency and the Phoenix Foundation, but as for what James does , why the Agency took the secrecy of the Phoenix and cranked it up to twelve, there's been nothing. So, when he says it, Mac blinks at him, and asks him to repeat himself.

"There's a project," James says, smiling, excited, "that I want you to work on with me. For the Agency." He looks like a twelve year old geek the day of the science fair. Almost giddy.

"Dad, I…" It's a sentence Mac doesn't know how to finish. _Dad, we're trying, I'm doing my best, but I don't trust you anywhere near enough to follow you into the field_. "I can't work for you," is what he settles on, and hopes James doesn't push too hard.

Push James does, but not in the direction Mac had expected him to.

"Not work _for_ me," he insists, taking a step closer. There's a folder in his hand, the one he's not gesturing with. "Work _with_ me. Come on, Angus, just think- The only thing better than one of us on a project is two of us, it's like a dream come through. And it's a good one, I promise- real brain-teaser. You used to love puzzle games when you were a kid."

Despite the voices in his head, his better angels in a chorus with what sounds like Jack, telling him this is a bad, bad idea, Mac smiles a slight, hesitant smile, and agrees.

And James is right, at least in the sense that it is interesting, though something feels a little off. The mission, at least the parts of it James is asking for his help navigating, it quickly takes up Mac's life, sapping away any spare time he'd had, until he finds himself sitting at his father's dining room table when off work more often than not. And just like the rest of it, it's not so bad at first.

Parts of it feel just a little too set-up, a little too neat in the sense that it reads just like a problem out of one of those puzzle game books, albeit set to an extreme difficulty level, but Mac ignores it. Maybe it's his father's questionably-executed plan at bonding with him, maybe he's just being paranoid. Either way, James is encouraging and excited when he comes up with a good solution to a problem, and there's something about sitting elbow-to-elbow with his father to work out a problem together that feels like the realization of everything Mac has ever wanted.

It doesn't take long for James to start getting frustrated. Mac tells himself it's about the mission, about how long it's taking to put the pieces together, the thousand little snags they're hitting. It's not about him, Mac repeats when old doubt creeps in, hisses in his ear that his father's given him a trail run and found him wanting, is frustrated with _him_ rather than the mission. That's not the case, it can't be. It's just insecurity.

Right now, his father is on some tangent, standing in front of a white-board covered in felt marker script and diagrams. Mac has stood up somewhere mid-way through the rant, grabbing his jacket and shrugging it on. He was supposed to meet Jack at his place ten minutes ago, and there's already a worried text sitting unanswered on his phone.

"Dad," he says, after it becomes apparent that he's not going to slow down on his own.

"-and then, if we leverage that against the welding on the side of the-"

"Dad!" The raised voice catches James' attention.

" _What_ , do you have something to _add_?"

Ignoring the abrasive tone, Mac holds up the phone, shaking it a little.

"I've gotta get going if I'm gonna make it tonight. I'm already late, Jack's getting worried.

Something in James' face twitches, just like it always does when Jack comes up, and Mac tries hard to ignore it.

"So tell him you're not coming," the older man dismisses. "We're busy."

"What?" The order takes Mac by surprise. "I can't just blow him off, I already cancelled on him once a couple days ago, because you needed to talk part of a mission out. I can't do that twice in a week."

"Yes, you can," dismisses James with a shake of his head. "Sit back down."

Mac doesn't move.

"You'll see him at work tomorrow," James snaps when he looks like he's about to re-start his protest. "What does it matter? We're in the middle of an important step of this plan, Angus, how is that less important than tearing off to hang out with somebody you already see all the damn time."

"I don't work for you," Mac points out, not liking the tone James has taken or the directives themselves. "I'm your son not your agent. You don't give me orders."

"If you don't want to be here, go right on ahead and walk out the door, Angus, you're free to leave."

The words hang in the air along with James' hand, pointedly extended towards the door. The implication is clear. If he wants to leave, James isn't going to stop him, but there's no guarantee he'll be welcomed back either. (Never mind that his car isn't here, he couldn't just take off without calling a taxi or one of his friends, would be left standing on the sidewalk for minutes on end, feeling the weight of having been the one to walk out this time.)

Mac sits down.

 _Sorry_ , he texts Jack, watching James out of the corner of his eye. _Something came up_.

Getting away for a while on the out of country mission to rescue the diplomat is a nice break, time for Mac to clear his head. He sees the looks Jack and Riley are sending him, the way Bozer is trying to hard to act like everything is normal, and tries to pretend he doesn't know what it's about. He's hardly on the plane home before there's another message on his phone, just a time and an instruction.

 _11:30. Tomorrow. I'll pick you up._

Things have been tense since he got back from the mission, though how much is because of actual stiff air between he and James and how much is because of Riley's questions about his work for the Agency, her promise that they could pull him out if he needed them to. It's an offer that he can't stop thinking about, not since the day she'd made it.

 _Pull him out_. Why would he need them to do that? He's not in trouble. He's tired, and he feels like he's bearing the brunt of James' shortening temper, getting snapped at every two minutes, interrogated on the off-beat, but he's not in _trouble_.

At the moment, Mac is picking apart the plans for a security system he's never heard of. It seems like a hybrid of at least three top models, and he's been staring at it for thirty minutes wondering where the hell this is leading, how much of a problem it's going to cause if he asks again. The first time, James had given him a look and said, 'One step at a time, we'll get to that', his tone suggesting that he wasn't open to being asked twice.

"Why would you approach from that angle," James says over his shoulder, causing Mac to jump. It's toned in a disapproving downward tilt, more of an accusation than a question.

"Because it represents the least risk to the agent," Mac explains, trying not to let the instinctual bristling show through in his voice. It's the sixth such question James has asked during this analysis of the security of a building the occupants of which have not even been revealed to him, and it's grating, especially seeing as the more. "The surveillance is the simplest to hack and the guard the lightest on the South-facing entrance."

"But it'll take on average four and a half minutes longer than an approach from the sub-basement at the delivery entrance."

Finally fed up with feeling like he's being given a pop-quiz in an insanely hard class he never signed up for, Mac is about to snap and tell James exactly what's wrong with that idea, including the three extra ways it opens up for the agent potentially attempting the breech to get caught or worse, when his phone rings. He's unnerved enough, high-strung and on-edge enough from the constant barrage of questions, that his hand clenches involuntarily into a fist when the device buzzes. The caller ID is clear as day, flashing up on the screen.

 _Jack Dalton_

Mac's hand is halfway to the phone when his father's voice cuts through the air, plainly unhappy with his action.

"Don't answer that," James says. He sounds appalled that Mac was even considering it. "We're having a conversation. I asked you a question. You can talk to Dalton later."

"But I-"

"You know, it's concerning, his behavior," continues James before Mac can get half a sentence out. His voice has gone controlled and even, the plastic concern of a school principal confronting a star student about a suddenly dropping GPA but worried only for the school's averages. "It's controlling, the way he's constantly keeping tabs on you. I've lost count of how many times he's called you while you're here with me."

 _That's because I'm_ always here, _Dad_ , Mac wants to argue, but he knows it'll turn into a fight if he says it, so he doesn't. He just doesn't have it in him to go ten rounds with his dad about Jack today. It's a fight they've had before, about how much time Mac spends with Jack. Several times, in fact, between the arguments where James' questions about his 'hacker friend' sounded a little too much like questions of Riley's integrity, times his curiosity as to how Bozer is faring at the Phoenix sounded a little too much like poking holes in his fitness for the job.

Mac grits his teeth and silences the phone. He takes a few deep breaths before returning to the current problem at hand.

"What's wrong," he says, trying to keep the exhaustion and upset at once again being told to ignore his partner out of his voice, "with four and a half extra minutes on entry if it keeps the agent attempting the breach safer than the shorter route?"

"Efficiency, Angus, you're planning with no sense of _efficiency_. Our agents are competent enough to handle themselves, stop worrying so much about the human factor and focus on the objective."

"Which is…" Mac trails off, the irritated bite in the words a clear request for more information. James frowns at him, then shoves the plans further over the table in front of him, scattering through a small pile of paperclips Mac has been messing with to help him concentrate. The movement is harsh and abrupt, more frustration betrayed in it than James has let seep through his calm, cool voice.

"Which is getting past the security system."

Footsteps begin to fade into the other room, then about face and return, walking right up behind him. The paperclip Mac has picked up, twisting it around and around as he stares at the suggested breach point of the sub-basement's delivery entrance, is abruptly snatched out of his fingers, flicked back onto the table. Before he can say anything, too stunned by the unforeseen action to formulate a quick response, James is resuming his path out of the room.

"Quit fidgeting, Angus," his voice says reprovingly. His head doesn't turn to so much as glance back. "You're distracting yourself. I expect better from you. You're not ten anymore."

James disappears around the corner. Mac is left unmoored and directionless, stinging from the chastisement and the lack of ability to explain that - in accordance with the ADHD diagnosis he'd received two years after James took off - fidgeting helps _keep_ him from getting distracted. The entire interaction pinballed so fast from one mood to the next that he hardly knows how to feel about it, how to process what was said. So, rather than try, he looks back down to the plans.

Held in his lap beneath the table, his hands twitch against each other, restlessly searching for something, anything to do. If he reaches for another paperclip, James could walk back in and see, and then he'll hear it over disregarding instructions, _Don't you ever listen to_ anyone, _Angus? Jesus Christ what kind of ship are they running over there at your Foundation? We don't let that kind of thing fly at the Agency. Your boss is either a saint or stupid. Your partner too._

Like James doesn't know Mac's boss far, far better than that. Like he doesn't react to Jack's name coming up like he's a particularly unpleasant kind of chore, one you avoid until you can't dodge doing it any more. It hadn't been like this, at first. James hadn't started right away with the comments about his team, telling him not to answer his phone or cancel plans, 'what's the big deal, you'll see them at work anyway'. That had started so rarely that Mac hadn't noticed it until he was ignoring every other text, until it feels like it's been weeks since he's seen even his roommate outside of work. Looking back on it now, it's with a creeping horror that Mac realizes he doesn't know how it got this way, how he ended up feeling like he's trapped in an endless argument that he can never win or get out of.

And always, in the background, those words that first gave him the instinct to run. _My job isn't what I was protecting you from._

 _I just got so_ angry.

 _How did I get here,_ Mac thinks numbly, staring at security system plans he's not really seeing. _How did I get here. How did I get here._

Things hadn't been this bad, at first.

If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it'll jump out. But if you put it in a pot of water that's cold, and you gradually turn the heat up, the frog will die before it notices what's happening. It doesn't know what's going on is dangerous until it's too late, and it dies. It's an age-old analogy, one everyone and their mother is familiar with, and it's popped into Mac's head without warning or explanation. He dismisses it immediately, feeling something in his chest get tight and hard.

That analogy has no place here. Things have gotten weird, they've gotten hard, his father has become a present source of… of exhaustion and anxiety, and every time he comes here he leaves feeling an ache in his chest like his insides have been rearranged and put back in wrong, but it's not… That analogy is a familiar one, and it's in every textbook and pamphlet describing the warning signs of abuse that's ever been published. But it has no place here, because what his father's doing, the way their relationship has gone, it's hard, it's maybe even gone down a bad road, but it's not like _that_. It's nothing he can't handle. It's certainly not abuse.

( _Right_?)


	5. Chapter 5

Thanks a millionth time for how wonderful you guys have been! It's been a real treat, sharing this fic with you, and though I've been massively nervous about posting it, you've made it a hundred percent worth it.

(warning: emotional/psychological abuse, physical abuse)

* * *

Jack would be lying if he said part of the reason he was so ready to head back for dinner with Riley and Bozer after their trip down the boardwalk wasn't the hope that, upon returning to the house, Mac might be there. He was supposed to have gone with them but hadn't showed. Jack's call had gone unanswered, while Bozer received their only communication from him - one text, short and to the point, apologizing for being unable to make it. This is not the first such occurrence.

On a whim, Jack pulls out his phone. Maybe...

"Still nothing from Mac, huh?" Riley's eyes are sympathetic when Jack looks up at her, and his face creases in annoyance with itself for whatever showed to clue her into what was going on.

"Nope," he confirms, the word coming out short and frustrated, while worry and something wounded pulse under the grating tone. "Starting to wonder if maybe I've done something to piss him off."

Riley doesn't let it go, folding her arms and giving him an unimpressed look. "Come on. You know it's not like that. "

She's right, and Jack sighs, admitting so.

"Has he told you anything about this mission plan he's working on with James, the one for the Agency?" she asks.

"No, he hasn't said anything. Nothing real, anyway, he's being really evasive about it, which I don't care for at all, thanks so much," Jack mutters, shoving his phone back in his pocket.

"Every time Bozer or I ask about how things are going with James, that's all he talks about, is this mission, and I don't know if-"

The conversation is interrupted when the front door opens, and in walks the object of their conversation himself. Mac stands there on the threshold, taking in the presence of not just Bozer but Jack and Riley as well, and Jack could swear he looks surprised they're there.

"...Hey guys," he says after a while. Jack doesn't miss the forearm propped against the doorway, the curve of his shoulders. He's tired - he's more than tired, he's worn through.

There's an attempt at small-talk, which ends up awkward and stilting while the specter of worry and the things Mac won't or can't talk about hang over them. The unfinished business of earlier, whatever it was Riley had been about to say about the mission, it exists in the background, the half-formed elephant in the room. The whole thing doesn't last long before Mac excuses himself, walks out onto the back patio alone, leaving the other three behind in the kitchen.

"Well?"

Looking over at her, Jack sees Riley staring at him expectantly. Bozer too, both of them looking at him like they don't know what he's still doing there.

"Go on," she says, gesturing in the direction Mac left in, "go talk to him."

Glancing outside at the exhausted form sitting slumped on the patio furniture, Jack takes a deep, steadying breath and nods. Acutely aware of both Riley and Bozer's eyes on him, he leaves with slow steps, made so by the knowledge that he doesn't know what he's going to say. It's hard to walk confidently towards a conversation when you don't even know how you're going to _start_ it.

When Jack approaches, Mac is fidgeting with something, probably a paperclip, twisting it around and passing it from one hand to another.

"Whatcha got there?" Jack asks, sitting down next to him.

Quicker than can have much thought behind it, Mac shoves the object, whatever it was, into his pocket and out of sight, then mutters, "Nothing."

Eyebrows raised, taken aback by the intensity of his reaction, Jack says nothing for a long moment. He studies Mac, unsettled by his behavior. Well, _more_ unsettled, at any rate. There's been nothing about Mac's behavior that hasn't been worrying. Not since James… Since James.

Over the sounds of Riley and Bozer, speaking indistinctly to one another in the background, the silence on the patio is heavy. Jack is growing tired of staying quiet, both in the sense of this specific moment and the broader context of everything that's going on. He's been watching Mac grow more distant, more drained, more unlike himself, and he's _tired_ of it.

What's more, there's another concern that's arisen in his mind, one competing against his reasons not to speak up. While it's true Mac may see his attempt at counsel as overbearing, as a second-hand surrogate instinctively and stiflingly overprotective at the arrival of the actual parent in question, there's also the possibility that Mac will look at his reticence, the lack of expression of the concern he absolutely feels, and see it as a lack of concern at all. It's not a stretch to imagine that Mac, with insidious insecurity rooted in him as deeply as boundless curiosity, would look at Jack's attempt to preserve their relationship and Mac's agency by not interfering as proof Jack didn't really care, at least not as much as he'd always claimed to.

The choice between which outcome he's going to risk is hardly a choice at all. In a contest between seeming like he cares more than he should, and like he doesn't care as much as he does, there is one clear option that stands out as the one Jack can't make himself be okay with Mac thinking of him.

"I'll cut right to the chase. I'm worried about you, kid. I know something's going on with you," Jack says quietly. He looks away from Mac and out over the skyline of Los Angeles, wanting to remove as much pressure as possible off what's already going to be a difficult conversation. It feels like the first real conversation they've had in a long time. Far too long. "Riley and Bozer say they've both tried to talk to you about it when I asked them, but they didn't get very far."

One of Mac's shoulders rises in an awkward partial shrug that Jack catches out of the corner of his eye.

"I know something's eating at you," he continues, "and I have a pretty good feeling I know it's about your dad." It takes all of Jack's restraint to avoid glancing to the side, to see if his young friend's face betrays any reaction to the educated guess. "So I'm gonna try asking you myself, this time. What's going on with you, with James? Is something wrong? Has something happened?"

If Mac had known in that moment what was going to happen, how much worse things could get, he would've told Jack everything right then and there. Everything James has said, everything about the way he feels, everything he's afraid of. Everything. But he doesn't know, can't know, and so he just shakes his head, slow and guilty.

What is he supposed to say?

 _He talks to me like I'm a stupid kid who's pissing him off on purpose and it feels like when he looks at me all he sees is a disappointing letdown instead of the miniature version of himself that he expected to find._

 _The dad I got isn't the dad I wanted._

 _I keep comparing him to you._

"I'm just tired," he says, and it's not a lie. "The job we're working on it's… I'm just tired." Not a lie. "You don't have to worry." Not… a lie? "I'm fine." Lie.

"Mhm." To his credit, Jack doesn't sound like he's entirely bought that last part. "You just be careful, okay? I don't trust him. I gotta say it, kid, I know he's your old man and having this relationship with him has been so important to you for so long, but I can't… I don't trust him with you for a minute. I want you to promise me you'll be careful, and that if this thing he's pulled you into starts going dark-side, you'll tell me."

 _I don't know how we're defining 'dark-side' here_ , Mac thinks, gripped by the almost hysterical urge to laugh, _but the fact that I need a specific definition to decide whether or not it's too late for that is an indication I've made a mistake._

"I mean it," Jack reiterates, seemingly unnerved by Mac's lack of a response. "If you're in danger, you _tell me_. That's how this 'partners' thing works. You're in danger, you tell me, and we deal with it together. Deal?"

Well, that one is easier. His relationship with James is a lot of things, but it's not dangerous. He isn't in _danger_.

Mac smiles in a way he hopes is at least half convincing. "Okay," he agrees.

"Okay," repeats Jack.

A hand comes to rest Mac's shoulder with a grip that is equal parts solid and gentle. He's dressed only in a t-shirt, and against the deepening chill of night time in coastal California, the warmth of Jack's palm is a sharp contrast. Mac doesn't move.

Since that first brief, barely-there hug, and the time he'd grabbed Mac's arm to keep him from walking out again, James hasn't deliberately touched him once. He's kept his distance, despite being perfectly willing to disregard Mac's personal space for the sake of grabbing something he's looking at, leaning past him to get to something Mac is in the path to. Honestly, Mac doesn't know if he _wants_ the kind of affection from his father that he's grown somewhat accustomed to receiving from Jack, Bozer, and Riley. But that constant distance combined with how little time he's spent with those three outside of work has resulted in what amount of contact he's grown used to receiving being essentially gone.

It's thrown him off-kilter more than he would've predicted. Mac knows the science, of course he does, but he'd never thought of himself as the kind of person who needed that sort of thing. Apparently, he'd been wrong.

Jack's grip on his shoulder tightens a fraction, and Mac's eyes sting. He sits very still, and forces his breathing even, and chokes down the ridiculous, sudden urge to repeat every word James has said to him that left him feeling like all the air had gone from the room, just so that Jack would tell him none of it was true.

 _You're an adult, Angus. You need to grow up._

James' voice rings as clear as if he were standing there saying it in the flesh, rather than in an abruptly prominent memory, and Mac clears his throat.

"We should probably go inside and see what they're up to," he says, and he's proud of the way his voice doesn't crack at all. Without waiting for an answer, he quickly gets up and walks back into the house.

It's a good night, overall. Mac sits with his friends, close enough to Riley that he can feel her shake when she laughs, and slowly, his nerves, the ones that have been so tightly wound these past weeks that he's felt never more than an inch from snapping, smooth and calm. He relaxes and starts joking with them, smile losing its forced edge. He settles.

The next time Mac sees James, the older man doesn't bother with smalltalk. There are no questions about his day, about his team, about the work he's been doing for the foundation. From the moment Mac gets into his father's car, all James can talk about is the plan. The plan which has, in the week that's passed since they last discussed it, changed.

The plan has changed, with old problems becoming irrelevant, new hiccups causing trouble, and James ready with a question or a criticism or often both for every suggestion Mac comes up with.

Mac had been hoping it would get better, after that first series of troubleshooting, the two of them finding their footing with each other. In some ways, it has. James seems like he's having fun, sometimes, grinning at Mac with a 'nice work, son' after pieces fall neatly into place. Other times, though… When things aren't better, they're worse.

Frankly, Mac would prefer if it was just worse. That way he wouldn't be left guessing which version of James he would get in any given interaction, the one that looked at him with pride and satisfaction, or the one that refused to look at him at all, instead staring at blueprints and muttering something about lack of discipline, incorrigible stubbornness. If it were just worse, then, well, then he might be able to walk out the door one day and never come back. But it isn't, and something about the feeling that lights in Mac's chest when James tells him 'I'm proud of you' makes him want to hang on, just a little while longer, just until it settles, until worse goes away and it's only better.

It doesn't happen like that.

They've been arguing for thirty minutes. It's been _thirty minutes_ and they're still going around and around the same problem, with no sign of anything approaching a consensus. It's not even a big thing - it's a detail, just a detail.

"I'm warning you, Angus, you need to start _listening_ to me."

"I'm listening to you, I just think you're _wrong_ ," Mac fires back, stubbornness digging in its heels and relishing in the feeling of standing his ground against James. Pushing back. It feels pretty damn good, intoxicating in a way that has him rushing forward. He doesn't care if it starts a fight, he's tired of censoring himself, editing his thoughts in an attempt to make James happy with them.

"You're getting unnecessarily worked up about this," James chastises. He sounds almost _bored_ , and it drives Mac's frustration a couple notches higher. "Be rational. If we send the agent from that angle we jeopardize the mission by extending the timeline. Time is key, nothing matters more than expediency."

Snorting in derision, Mac shakes his head. This is his least favorite version of his father - the one that likes to lecture him about how you can't be sensitive in this line of work, you have to be able to shut off sentiment and focus on the objective. Mac can't wrap his mind around it, how a person who works for an organization dedicated to saving people - presumably, not that he knows what the Agency actually _does_ \- can care this little about ensuring the safety of his agents. People he works with, people he _knows_.

"Expediency means nothing if the agent dies in the process," Mac persists. He's not willing to let this go, despite his spiking nerves, the voice in his head telling him he's playing with fire.. "Jack said something like that to me once, he said 'You can do something fast or you can do it right, and if you pick fast, you had no business doing it in the first place.' You're picking _fast_ , dad. I'm trying to pick right, and I need you to back off and let me." Heart thundering in his chest, Mac doesn't look at James when his father snaps his name. He stands staring forward at the diagram.

"Angus, don't ignore me when I'm talking to you. You're a professional, you're above this."

Mac picks up the pin representing their infiltrating agent, moves it to the other side of the compound. James takes a step closer.

" _Hey_."

The sharp summons for his attention goes ignored completely. Mac instead keeps looking at the board rather than at his father, focusing on the plans in front of him, on figuring out how to tear them apart and put them back together only better, safer, less likely to get the agent killed.

The impact of James' hand across his face takes Mac completely by surprise. The force of the blow and the shock accompanying it are enough to send Mac staggering, catching himself on a nearby chair. He stands frozen in place for a second, shoulders stuttering out interrupted, patternless breaths. The side of Mac's face throbs, the aftershocks of the hard slap pulsing as proof that it had happened, hadn't been some ludicrous fabrication.

His father has just hit him.

Putting the back of his hand up, wiping at his mouth, Mac is struck dumb to see it come away bloody. Feeling a stinging pain, asking for his attention louder than the rest of the ache across his jaw and mouth, Mac comes to the conclusion that the force of the slap has caused his teeth to cut into the inside of his lip. The small red smear on his hand is mesmerizing, and he can't help but stare at it.

Blood. He's bleeding. Because his _father_ has just _hit_ him.

Still feeling emotionally numb, unable to process what's just happened, Mac looks back over at James. He doesn't know what he's expecting to see - equivalent shock, regret, remorse. Horror, at his own actions. _Something_.

James' face is calm, stoic. He doesn't look pleased with what's just happened, what he's just done, but neither does he seem to be rocked by it or feel the need to apologize. It's such a non-reaction that it throws reality into question.

 _This isn't happening. It can't be happening._

"You're gonna need to stop acting like you think you're smarter than me and everyone else real quick or you're gonna end up in real trouble, kid." When James says the word, it holds none of the warmth, the undeniable fondness it does when Jack says it. It's an endearment made into a degradation, and Mac hates the sound of it.

Nowhere in himself can Mac find it to respond to the chastisement. It feels like all his words have left him, all his capacity for speech abandoned him in the wake of what's happened, the thing he can hardly force himself to name or acknowledge, to remember, though the moment James' hand connected with his face is inescapably replaying itself on a loop.

Obviously coming to the conclusion that he'll get no more out of Mac now, James turns abruptly away. If Mac hadn't been frozen, completely immobile, he'd have flinched.

"Get in the car," James says after a moment, motioning his son towards the door. "I'm taking you home. We'll talk about this again tomorrow."

Mac is numb when he finally moves to follow, numb when he gets in the vehicle, numb while they drive without a word back to the house, numb except for the side of his face, still aching in time with his heartbeat. He doesn't know what to do. What to think. How to process any of this. It feels like he's been wading through water, waist-high and turbulent but nothing he couldn't handle, until suddenly the drop-off came and he's gone under.

California scenery passes in a blur, and Mac hardly sees it. His mouth tastes like copper.


	6. Chapter 6

Totally and completely floored by how amazing the reception to this has been. Thank you all so much, and I hope you'll continue sharing your thoughts with me.

For everyone who guessed so, you're right - things are gonna get worse before they get better.

(warning: emotional/psychological abuse, major focus on aftermath of physical abuse)

* * *

When James pulls up outside of Mac's house and lets him out, it's late at night. Neither of them says a word to the other the entire drive over, and this does not change as Mac gets out, shutting the door gingerly behind him. He walks to the front porch without looking back once, though he's hyper-aware of the sound of James' car pulling away down the street.

The question of how the hell he's going to explain the state of his face to Bozer is one that only occurs to him far too late, with his key already in the door. Adrenaline jolts through his chest as the door swings open and he braces for the question he's not going to be able to answer - what happened to you?

By some stroke of luck, though whether it's good or bad luck is undetermined, the house is dark and silence inside. Bozer must already be asleep, shut in his own room, and the building holds the hushed peace of night-time.

Maybe it's for the best. Mac is desperately avoiding the memory of the evening, trying in vain to shove it out of his mind every time it surfaces unbidden, and he doesn't know that he'd be able to talk about it, to explain how exactly he ended up bleeding. He couldn't've lied to Bozer about it, but the truth is something Mac doesn't think he could've said out loud. Bozer would've figured it out for himself, but he'd have added two and two together and come up to twelve, arrived at the conclusion that things were much more serious, much worse than they were.

Maybe it would've been better if Bozer had been there, if Mac had been forced to confront what James had done, confess it to someone who would've immediately done everything in his power to keep James from ever having the opportunity to do it again. There's no question in his mind about that. If Bozer found out, it all would stop there. What happened tonight, Mac is sure it won't happen again, but if his best friend knew, it wouldn't even get the chance to.

The question is moot, however. Bozer is asleep, and Mac slips through the house unnoticed. Once safely in his own bathroom, he stands in front of the sink with his head bowed and the water running, carefully not risking a glance upwards. He doesn't think he can stand to see himself in the mirror, see the immediate aftermath of the violence that he'd experienced not even half an hour earlier. The red smear on the back of his hand is bad enough, not to mention the maybe half-dollar coin sized stain that's grown on his sleeve from the effort of keeping the blood from getting on anything in his father's car.

Methodically, robotically, distanced from everything physically happening, Mac wets a washcloth and dabs at the corner of his mouth. What's left of the blood cleans quickly, there not having been much to begin with, and if there's any left behind, well, he'll deal with that tomorrow.

Without a single glance in the mirror and no idea what he currently looks like, Mac walks into his room and collapses onto his bed. A pulse of pain shoots through his cheek when the side of his face hits the pillow, and he sucks in a sharp breath. As he lays there in the dark, silent room, his brain is churning. He can't make sense of what's just happened.

Factually speaking, sure, he remembers the sequence of events.

He and James had their latest argument over a minor detail of the plan. Mac got tired of being told in a hundred different ways to disregard the life of the operating agent in favor of pragmatism and efficiency. James tried to shut him down. Mac got stubborn. James hit him. It's not complicated.

It just doesn't make _sense_ , and Mac doesn't even know how he feels about it. He can't believe it happened. He can't reconcile that it actually happened.

Sleep comes in fits and bursts, restless and interrupted.

When he finally wakes all the way up in the morning, ten seconds pass where he doesn't remember. Ten seconds of calm quiet stretch out through the still air of Mac's room, disturbed only by the vague sense there's something he's forgetting. It's a common enough feeling that it doesn't ruin the feeling, though, of stillness. Peace. Ten seconds of peace.

Ten seconds is all he gets, though, and the memory crashes abruptly into his awareness, the violent moment from the night before replaying itself inescapably. It's such a clear recollection it may as well actually be happening again. The crack of James' palm connecting with the side of his face rings in his ears, and Mac flinches sideways into his pillow, breathing hard and scrunching his eyes shut.

Several minutes of battling with himself, and Mac drags his exhausted body out of bed. He walks to the bathroom and stands at the sink, hands braced on white ceramic, trying to talk himself into looking up. There's no way around it. He has to see how bad it looks, what the damage is. Before he can figure out what to do next, what the hell he's going to say to Bozer, to Riley, to _Jack_ about what's wrong with his face, he has to know what's actually wrong with his face.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, reminding himself that he's stared down things a hell of a lot scarier than this, Mac looks up into the mirror and sees-

Nothing. There's nothing. Where James had struck him there's no bruising, no purpling marks of broken capillaries starbursting up his cheek. When he leans closer, looks intently at the left side of his face, there's some swelling, barely noticeable, and a bit of redness, tucked into the corner of his mouth, but that's it. The cut from his teeth isn't visible. It would be impossible to tell if you didn't already know, just by looking at him, that someone had very recently hit him.

Now that he's looked, Mac can't look away. He stares at his own face, a slightly delirious thought crossing his mind that maybe it hadn't happened at all. Maybe he'd dreamed the whole thing. His hand shakes a little when he raises it, pressing his fingers into his cheek and feeling his heart skip a beat when a pulsing pain erupts under the pressure. So no, then. It wasn't some kind of terrible dream. It had happened.

It's a thought that shadows him all morning, following behind him as he leaves his room, walks around the empty house. Bozer is already gone to work, and Mac himself isn't needed at the Foundation that day, left to bounce around the house left to his own devices. It happened. It was real. It happened.

Mac exists in a sort of haze, walking aimlessly around the house, starting tasks and leaving them half finished. He can't seem to concentrate on anything. Following rote steps he's walked a hundred times, Mac makes and eats a breakfast he can barely taste, spends maybe thirty minutes working on his bike, loads a handful of dishes into the dishwasher. All the while, in the background, the knowledge that he's running from something he doesn't want to acknowledge, hiding from the fact that it happened, it was real, it _happened_.

In the middle of rewiring a video-game console whose power port had been intermittently not working, the thought dawns on him. He should tell Jack. He should call Jack right now and tell him what happened, about the argument, all the arguments that had led up to it, the way this one had ended. Mac had agreed to tell him, if he gets to be in danger. But…

But Jack had been talking about the mission, not about the increasingly volatile relationship between Mac and James. Besides, what danger? Yes, there had been violence, his father had gotten tired of being ignored and hit him pretty hard, and it had hurt damn bad at the time, but there isn't even a bruise left behind. There is no evidence one could find without close inspection, knowing what they were looking for. Just a little cut on the inside of his lip that bled for fifteen minutes and only hurts when he disturbs it. That's not danger.

It's wrong. Mac's not naive, he's not blind, he knows it's wrong. He knows what James did to him is bad, that it never should've happened, that it was cruel. Abusive, even. Dangerous, though? It wasn't _dangerous_. Mac's hurt himself worse in a chemistry lab. There are a dozen small scars all over his body, remnants of experiments that went sideways on him, leaving permanent reminders behind. This? He doesn't even have a visible _bruise_ from this. And it's not like it's going to happen again.

Before he can think any more on it, Mac's phone starts ringing. Thinking it might be Jack, some sixth sense prompting him to call at this precise moment, he picks it up, glancing at the caller ID.

 _Dad_ it says, and three letters have never looked more foreboding. James' final words to him the night before, 'we'll talk about this again tomorrow', come back to mind, and Mac swallows hard. He doesn't want to answer. He doesn't want to hear his father's voice. Then again, all he's been able to hear all day is his father's voice, running on a loop of disappointment, correction, rebuke.

"What?" Mac says when he answered. The word comes out louder than he'd meant it to, harsh and echoing in the empty house.

"I was thinking about your approach," James starts, immediately off about the plan. The argument they'd been having the night before. The one that'd ended with-

"I'm not coming." Mac interrupts him in the middle of a tangent he'd hardly been following, having a world of trouble understanding what James is saying, why. How they're back here talking about this _plan_ when things had gone the way they did. When James had done what he'd done. "I'm not coming over there to keep helping you work on this damn plan when you won't even tell me what it's _for_. We've been building a mission to break into a compound and steal something out of an office and you won't even tell me _whose_ _office it is_ and what we're stealing from it. So I'm done. I'm out. I can't do this."

"Angus," James starts in a tone Mac has learned to hate.

For the second time in as many minutes, Mac interrupts him, saying, "No. I'm not helping you steal something when I don't even know what it is or why your Agency wants it. Hell, for all I know, you guys are the ones I'm usually working _against_ not for."

"An encryption key."

"What?"

There's a short, audibly frustrated sigh from the other end of the line. "If you're going to be like this about it-" _Like what, Dad? Be like what? Say it, it can't be worse than anything you've said to me already_ \- "then you should know, it's an encryption key."

"An encryption key to _what_?"

"The man who runs the criminal organization that owns the compound we've been planning the breach of stole a lot of highly sensitive documents and digital cache codes from us in a sting gone wrong," James elaborates. He sounds annoyed at being asked to explain himself, but at least he's doing it. At least he's answering Mac's questions. "They don't know that one of the disks they have, hidden under a top layer of data on old missions that never really happened, is an encryption key that can be used to access information on the identities and orders of upwards of a dozen deep-cover Agency operatives."

"So you need to steal it back before they realize what's on it," Mac summarizes. He's gotten up at some point off the couch he'd been sitting on before the phone rang, pacing around the living room and then off down the hall, dispersing anxious energy without a clear destination in mind.

" _Exactly_ ," says James. He sounds relieved. "We need to steal it back, and our plan has to be _flawless_. Otherwise it's game over for everyone implicated on that disk. I told you before, there's a lot of lives at stake, and I wasn't kidding. These are good people, good men and women that I know, I've worked with. If we don't get the disk back before they figure out what it unlocks, they're all dead. Time sensitive doesn't even begin to cover it, so I need you back over here, _tomorrow_."

"Time sensitive, I get," Mac agrees. "What I don't understand," _Other than all of it_ , "is why you need me on this with you. You've been so insistent that I help you with this, that it's just me, that we don't read my team in, that we don't get help from people at the Agency. That it's just us. But everything I can do, you can do too, probably better." _You're gonna need to stop acting like you think you're smarter than me and everyone else real quick_ , says James' memory. "I don't have specialized skills. I don't have prior knowledge or even _baseline_ knowledge of who you're up against, seeing as you won't-"

"Can't."

" _Can't_ tell me basically anything about them." Mac stops back in his own room, having meandered the entire length of his house over the course of the conversation. "There's no reason you need me on this, so why are you so… What does it matter if I help? Why do you need _me_?"

"Look, Angus," James sighs through the phone, and there's that tone again. Something in the way he says the name is making Mac nervous. The way James says his name _always_ makes him nervous, like whatever is about to follow, it's going to hurt. "I didn't bring you into this because I needed your brain. I could've done this without you, I didn't need you for the plan, not you specifically. That's not why I did it. I did it because you're my son and I love you and I wanted to spend time with you. Connect over something. I can't see what's so bad about that."

I love you.

Mac's lungs constrict and his breathing stutters to a stop. It's the first distinct time he can remember hearing those words coming out of his father's mouth. He's sure it must have happened when he was a child, before James left, but he can't remember it if it did.

"Anyway, I've said my piece. I'll be there to get you at ten tomorrow, either come out to the car or we're done. Your call."

It's an out, much like the one James gave him when the work on the plan had begun. _'If you don't want to be here, go right on ahead and walk out the door, Angus, you're free to leave.'_ It's in Mac's court now, just like it had been then, to decide whether or not to be the one to take on the responsibility of ending a relationship he'd been working so hard for. There's a voice in his head screaming at him, telling him that not even twenty-four hours previously this man had hauled off and slapped him across the face so hard he'd bled, what the hell is he doing even _thinking_ about going back there?

"I'll see you at ten," Mac says numbly, his own voice sounding far, far away.

The room, in the absence of the phone call, is eerie-quiet.

"You _idiot_ ," he mutters out loud to himself. He drops the cell-phone on the bedspread and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. Dully, distantly, his cheek aches. "You idiot, why would you do that? What's wrong with you? _Why would you do that_."

The incident - _you mean when your dad hit you last night because he got tired of you and your attitude_ , that _incident_? the same voice in his head pipes up - feels so unreal it's hard to convince himself it actually happened. It seems so much like a horrible figment of his imagining, the reality of what James had done too strange and awful to rationalize.

There's a real question as to what's harder to believe - the fact that James hit him the night before or the fact that James told Mac he loved him five minutes ago.

Life had been far easier when neither of these were things he had to think about, but the confluence of both of them has Mac feeling like his world's been upended and turned inside out. He doesn't know how to feel, or what to do, how to handle any of it, and he isn't proud of the decision he makes, which is to try and put it out of his mind completely.

So the rest of the day passes in a dissociated haze, and when ten o'clock the next morning rolls around, Mac ignores the feeling like TV static in his chest and gets in the car.


	7. Chapter 7

I know I'm super echo-y here, but it really is important to me that you guys know how much your comments and support mean to me - which is a whole, whole lot! Thank you times a million.

(warning: emotional, psychological, and physical abuse)

* * *

"It's my fault."

Mac's head raises from where he'd been sitting once again at James' dining room table, looking at schematics. He squints at the man, not entirely sure he'd heard correctly. He can't remember, either now or as a child, a time when James had ever directly admitted culpability for something, and certainly not unprompted. That he'd do so now seems wildly out of character, and there's only one thing he can imagine James could be talking about.

 _Please don't,_ he thinks. He can feel his pulse speeding up, thudding uneven in his chest. It's an odd realization, the knowledge that he doesn't want to hear James apologize. Because, if James apologizes, they'll have to talk about it. Mac will have to admit, to himself and more importantly to James, that he, not just a grown adult, but a highly trained agent, had just stood there and let someone hit him in the face, made no move to defend himself, and then turned right around and came back as soon as he was called.

Never mind that he's sure an apology would somehow twist and warp until it was all his fault to begin with. That aside, he just doesn't want to bear the humiliation of acknowledging that he'd let it happen. He's also pretty sure that if James talks to him about it, he might lose control completely, and he doesn't know what his father's reaction to that would be, but it wouldn't be impressed, that's for sure. One slap that hadn't even left a bruise and he's a mess. If Mac is this mad at himself about it, this disgusted with his own weakness, he can only imagine how appalled James would be.

"Are you listening to me?" It's not a yell, but James' voice is hard and disapproving. Mac can't help the jolt of fear he feels, immediately followed by just as sharp a pierce of shame at having felt it. "You're not messing around with those ridiculous paper clips again are you?"

 _You kept grabbing them out of my hands and then told me never to bring them into your house again_ , Mac thinks incredulously. _No, of course that's not what I'm doing._

"Pay attention," James says. He pulls out a chair and sits down, looking at Mac over the corner of the kitchen table. "I'm trying to talk to you. Anyway, as I was _saying_ , this whole thing, your priorities, your…" He waves vaguely in Mac's general direction, a nonspecific reference to something he obviously finds distasteful.

"What?" Mac can't help but ask. This conversation has gone in a direction he wasn't expecting, and he has no idea what James is trying to say.

"If I hadn't left," James says slowly, like he's talking to a small child or someone with a severe concussion, "things would be very different."

It's such an obvious statement of fact that Mac almost laughs out loud. Almost. It's also the first time since that initial set of conversations where James tried to explain himself and Mac tried to understand, that either of them brought up that first abandonment. It's hovered like a specter above them, translucent an intangible, but constant. Never more than a reminder away.

James continues, asserting with a rueful expression and a voice full of 'what if', "If I had stayed, I'd have taught you better."

" _What_ -"

"See that, _that_ is exactly what I'm talking about. Let me _finish_. You grew into a man with no sense of respect for authority, no _respect_. You're soft hearted and hard headed and that is a _fatal_ combination, Angus, the only question is who it'll get first, you or someone else." He must notice the look on Mac's face, how he's about to interrupt this latest of James' not infrequent detailing of his evidently many faults, because he holds up his hand, forestalling any protest or defense Mac may have offered. "You grew up somehow equal parts arrogant as all hell and terminally sentimental and it isn't your fault. It's mine. I should've been here, so I could have taught you better. But I'm here now. I'm back, and I intend to do what I can to correct that."

It's a promise that in all honesty leaves Mac scared. He's seen James' brand of correction, how he sees fit to address Mac's failings. Frequent criticism, often of Mac himself as well as whatever action James has taken issue with. Biting words he moves on from so quick there's barely time to process what he's said. A slap across the face.

Having apparently said his piece, James gets up, standing next to Mac, almost looming over him. One hand comes up, and Mac braces himself, holding completely, rigidly still. _He's not gonna do it again,_ he reminds himself. _He hit you once, it doesn't mean he'll do it again. Calm down._ True enough, the hand comes down to rest on Mac's shoulder. It lifts again after a brief squeeze, and Mac doesn't know how to respond to it. It was familiar, affectionate, that touch. It had been kind. Fond.

It reminds him of Jack, and the air in James' house suddenly feels difficult to take in.

Because, as nonsensical, as irrational, as _sick_ as it sounds, James' promise was almost comforting. Maybe, he should be grateful. After all, James might not be the father he'd wanted to find, but he holds no illusions about being the kind of son you'd want to have. James could've taken one look at him and thrown in the towel. Maybe he should be grateful, that James sees something in him that's worth staying for, worth teaching. Worth fixing.

( _Jack stayed._ The voice that pipes up is an unwelcome one that makes Mac's heart pulse and constrict. _Jack stayed over and over, and he has never tried to_ fix _you._

Almost immediately, another thought follows.

 _Maybe he should have._ )

Once he agreed to go back that first time, it was impossible to find a new reason not to. So Mac goes back again. He allows James to pick him up - the man always insists on driving and Mac doesn't even begin to have the energy to argue about it - and spends hours more at that dining room table. They're knee deep in what to do about a set of extremely high-tech security cameras when Mac brings up something he's spoken of periodically since the beginning.

"Riley would know what to do here," he says, looking at a string of code he can't make heads or tails of.

"Your hacker friend." The way James says it is twisted with distaste.

He's never outright said he disapproves of Riley, for her record and past, just like he's never outright said he thinks Mac should've let Bozer go with childhood, never outright said he harbors a specific and baseless dislike of Jack, frowning or becoming angry every time Mac mentions his name. James isn't fond of explanation, of handing Mac anything. He's supposed to 'figure it out, Angus', and this one at least is not hard. Riley is a criminal, Bozer is a relic of the past and it's immature to be in your twenties and still living with your childhood best friend, and as for Jack… Mac can't miss the undercurrent of resentment, the fierce jealousy that belies everything James has to say about him.

James is a smart man, a fact he won't let anyone for a moment lose sight of. It wouldn't be hard for him - isn't hard for random strangers, given the number of times they've been mistaken for family while on missions or just out and about - to come to the conclusion, hearing Mac talk about him, meeting him a handful of times, that Jack has assumed a parental role in his son's life. Regardless of how unfair it was for Mac to put that on him, it's impossible to deny what happened. And James is not happy that someone else has stepped up in his absence.

Never is his dislike of Mac's team clearer than when Mac brings up the possibility of asking for their help.

"Riley would be able to take care of this in less than a day," he insists, still with the unfinished cascade of troublesome code on his screen. "If you could just let me tell them, get clearance for us to bring them in…"

Before he's even finished the sentence, James is shaking his head.

"You need to learn this," he says, tapping the screen, "rather than always depending on being able to run to someone else to do it for you." Without giving Mac time to respond with why, exactly, becoming an expert in computer science and hacking was both impractical and unnecessary, not to mention unrealistic, James moves on, to a point that demands far more immediate attention. "And besides, I don't want to hear from you again about this. I've told you before, we cannot bring your team into this. It was hard enough convincing the Agency to let me involve you."

"And the reason we can't just do it _anyway_?" Mac asks. "You're the one who taught me to improvise, dad. Well, we need to improvise. You're high up in the Agency, you're practically in charge. What's the worst they could do?"

"You don't want to know the answer to that," James says, voice spiking in both volume and force. Mac shrinks a fraction at the sound, and his eyes are fixed on his father's hands, unable to stop tracking them. "I'm important, yes, but that doesn't mean I don't have bosses, people I answer to. Bosses whose actions, if Riley and Bozer and Dalton are brought in, I will not be responsible for or capable of stopping."

Dread spiders down Mac's shoulders in tiny, cold bursts. That sounded like…

"What are you saying?" he asks numbly.

"I'm saying, keeping them out of the loop is for their own good. My organization takes its security and its privacy very, _very_ seriously."

When James moves on as he always does, quickly and without warning, Mac is left with fear wound around his lungs, growing fractionally tighter with every breath. Fear of the Agency, fear for his team, his family.

Fear of James.

Despite himself, Mac can't stop watching his hands. It's paranoid and pathetic - it was once, once - but he can't help it. His eyes track every twitch, his mind telling him to get out get out _get out_ every time James gets closer to him.

 _Knock it off,_ he orders himself after too sharp a movement from James left him with a thundering pulse and arrested breath. _He did it once and you didn't even bruise. It won't happen again. This was a one time thing._

It takes a week from the first time he did it for James to hit him again.

The smack over the side of the head is both expected and a surprise, a heavy thud of a blow that knocks Mac sideways. Only a quickly thrown out arm keeps him from going sprawling across the couch. Mac can't remember, later, what they'd been arguing about when it happened - or indeed if they'd been arguing at all. It's possible he'd just been distracted, said something James thought was inexcusably stupid, some other misstep needing correction.

What Mac remembers is the sound, the pain, the way his vision took a moment to clear after he was struck. How James acted once more like it hadn't happened, like everything was normal. Like everything was fine.

After that, it only takes three days for it to happen again. The slap leaves no bruise this time either.

From the fourth time on, Mac stops telling himself it won't happen again.

* * *

Bozer was worried before, but now he's scared. If things had been bad, now they're worse. He's been wracking his brain for a time he can remember Mac being like this - when his dad first disappeared, when Nikki died, when it turned out Nikki hadn't died. But none of it compares. This is new. That had been bad - this is _bad_.

It's with a jolt one day, watching the car pull away from the curb, that Bozer realizes he wishes they'd never found James. He feels bad a second later. He knows what that search had meant to Mac. He'd been there from the start, seen every step of the whole awful ordeal. Better perhaps than anyone, Bozer understands why finding him mattered and how much.

As soon as the guilt comes, it is just as easily dismissed. Because as sure as he knows how much it hurt Mac to not have any answers, he also has a front row seat to Mac's current state. Three months and he's watched Mac age five years, exhausted and refusing to look Bozer in the eye more often than not. Riley's suspicious as all get out, watching Mac like a hawk, and Jack… It feels like ages since Bozer came home to find Jack and Mac hanging out in the living room. And when they are together, Mac avoids letting him ask questions, every time answering the same way when it's unavoidable.

 _Just tired, this mission's taking a lot out of me._

 _Just stuff with the Agency mission._

 _Just been working late with my dad, this mission is complicated._

 _The mission._

Mac gets a funny look on when he thinks no one's watching, watching Jack with an expression Bozer can only think to describe as loss and the sense that Mac is holding something back, keeping something he wants badly to tell held back where no one can find it.

 _Say it,_ Bozer wants to tell him, wants to yell at him. _Say it, whatever this mission is that's got you so bad off, tell him. Tell Jack. He'll fix it, I promise, he'll fix it_.

So no, other than that brief moment, Bozer doesn't feel bad for wishing James had never been found, and wishing him gone now that he's here. He conducts the rest of his day with this thought as background noise. Errands are run, grocery shopping completed, and there persistent in his mind is the knowledge that he doesn't so much care anymore about what the actually mission is. He hates it. He hates it, and he hates James for dragging Mac into it, and he wants his best friend far, far away from it _and_ James.

Mac still isn't home when Bozer goes to bed that night. It's not the first time this has been the case, and Bozer isn't any more comfortable with going to sleep with the knowledge that Mac is still out there with James doing god knows what than he'd been the first time. He must get home at some point, though, because Bozer gets up that night to get a glass of water, only to be stopped cold outside of Mac's room.

There's a sound, coming from the room. It's muffled and indistinct, but it sounds _terrified_ and Bozer's heart lurches to a stop before taking off like a racehorse at the track. He has the distinctly unpleasant honor of knowing through literal years of experience exactly what Mac sounds like when he's having nightmares, and this is a bad one. He hesitates for a moment, steeling his nerves, then knocks.

"Mac," he says. No response, just a brief pause in the noise followed by a completely unintelligible word. Bozer raises his voice. "Mac, man, if you can hear me, it's Bozer and I'm coming in." Still no response, and Bozer opens the door.

Right as he steps across the threshold of the room, Mac bolts upright in bed, a quiet shout escaping him. It's cut off halfway through, like he'd tried to choke it silent when he realized what was happening. In the dim gloom of the late hour, Bozer can make out his silhouette, see from the doorway how hard he's shaking. It's only a few long strides from there to the bed, and Bozer sits down gingerly. He leans into Mac's line of sight, saying his name again.

Once he's sure Mac knows it's him and isn't likely to react badly, Bozer reaches for him, settling a hand on Mac's shoulder. Wide, frightened eyes lock onto Bozer's for a moment, and then he does something completely unexpected. Mac tips forward, falling against his friend like a puppet with the strings cut. Bozer adjusts to compensate, startled by the openly expressed need of the reassurance being offered. It ignites a fierce defensiveness, and Bozer wraps an arm protectively around his roommate's back, just under heaving, stuttering shoulder blades. His other hand is pressed to the nape of Mac's neck, fingers caught in his hair.

"It's okay," he mutters breathlessly, for lack of anything else to say. "It's okay. You're safe. It's okay."

Mac says nothing in response. He isn't crying, though Bozer kind of wishes he were. If he were, that would still be less unnerving than this wordless shuddering, the way his face is pressed against Bozer's collarbone like he's hiding from something. Crying, Bozer knows what to do with. This is out of his depth, and he feels completely lost.

 _We can't protect you unless you tell us what's going on_ , he thinks, and says again, "It's okay. You're safe." It feels like a lie. In his arms, Mac keeps shaking, like he knows it is, like he knows the truth.

This is not by far the first of Mac's nightmares Bozer has witnessed, nor is it even the first he's held him through the fallout of. It's usually okay, it's enough after a minute and Mac pulls away, embarrassed and apologetic, shaking off the dregs of whatever horror taunted him in sleep and regaining his composure. That doesn't seem to be happening this time, which means Bozer had been right, and it's one of the _really_ bad ones. Which means there's only one thing he can think of to do, one thing that might work when it's this bad.

"Should I call Jack?"

Those seem to be the magic words, though not the way they usually are. At hearing his partner's name, Mac pulls away, drawing a deep breath in and holding it longer than Bozer is comfortable with. He lets it out and repeats the process until the shaking has stopped, save the occasional errant tremor. At the conflictedness on his face, the hesitation in how he doesn't answer, Bozer assumes this is indeed the appropriate course of action and moves to stand, to get his phone and make the call for backup. That's when Mac's hand shoots out, grabbing onto his wrist and stopping him before he can even straighten his spine.

"No," Mac says, and his voice is a hoarse, reluctant croak. " _Don't_. It's- Don't call him. It's fine, I'm fine." When he seems sure that Bozer has stopped moving, he retracts his hand, scrubbing at his own face. "I'm sorry, it's fine, I don't- Sorry."

"Just what the hell is it you think you have to be sorry for, exactly?" The question comes out maybe harsher than it was supposed to, and Bozer feels a jolt of sick guilt at the way Mac, still not entirely awake and nowhere near out of the grip of whatever he'd been dreaming about, cringes. "I meant-"

"I know. It's okay." Mac looks away, shrugs, looks down at his bedspread. "I just- Don't- _Ugh_ , sorry- I _mean_ -"

"It's okay," it's now Bozer's turn to say, reaching out again and laying a palm over Mac's forearm. The muscle under his hand is rigid and tensed. "I won't call him." A fraction of relaxation. "I'll just… I'll just sit here, for a minute. Is that cool? I'll sit here with you for a bit and we don't have to talk or- I'll just stay."

A further release of tension, and the relief in the air is palpable.

"Okay," Mac mutters. He still won't look Bozer in the face, but he does lay back down, and that's a win.

Once Mac is all the way back in bed, blankets pulled tightly around himself, Bozer settles into a comfortable spot at the top of the mattress. His hip is inches from Mac's shoulder, his hand resting lightly on his fabric-shrouded upper arm. They're both quiet and still for a long, long time, long enough it almost seems as if Mac's slipped back into sleep.

"Thank you. I'm sorry." It's barely more than a breath.

Bozer squeezes his arm in response, once, lightly. Just enough to send a message.

 _You're welcome_ , it says. _It's alright. I'm still here_.

The conversation may be over for now, but he doesn't think he can just let this one go. Not in the context of everything else. With a resolve to call Jack first thing in the morning, Bozer nods to himself, and settles in to wait for Mac to fall back asleep.


	8. Chapter 8

Y'all are really just the best, I mean it, thank you. I'm ballparking right now this is gonna end up being maybe eleven, twelve chapters, so we're fast coming up on the culmination of this whole mess! Thanks again for your support, I hope you continue enjoying it.

(warning: emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. a scene of some serious self-hatred and warped thinking due to abuse. mac is not kind to himself in this chapter.)

* * *

Mac has been standing in front of his bathroom mirror, unable to tear his eyes off his own reflection, for an indeterminate amount of minutes. He feels unsteady on his feet and he can hear his own blood rushing in his ears, a cacophony of white noise. He can't think above the sound, above what he can't stop staring at.

A bruise. There's a bruise, lightly smudged around his left orbital socket like someone had dipped a finger in grey-blue eyeshadow and wiped it over his skin. To call it a black eye would conjure an image that goes too far, implying something ugly and brutal. This is more a shadow, a memory made visible on Mac's face of what had happened the day before.

It's not the first bruise James has left on him - there's a stripe of aching discoloration hidden beneath his shirt, painted above his hip when he'd collided hard with the counter in James' kitchen, and the imprint of a hand gripping his shoulder and shaking him has only just faded - but it is the first mark he has no way of hiding. This, more than anything else, scares him. James hadn't meant to hit him so hard. It's Mac's own fault, really, that the mark is there. He'd tried to duck his head oddly at the last second, causing the blow to land awkwardly, not quite where and how James meant it to.

James hadn't hurt him on purpose. James hit him, sure, but it was a reprimand, a warning. It wasn't to hurt him.

Showing up to work with a visible bruise on his face is one of the most nerve-wracking things Mac has ever done, and he's done things that would take years off any normal person's life on a bi-weekly basis since he was nineteen years old. The amount of effort expended into looking and acting like everything is fine is enormous. When Mac walks through the hallways to where he's meeting his team, he feels like he's under a microscope. He's likely imagining the level of scrutiny focused on him - a field agent walking around mildly injured is not even approaching unusual - but to Mac, it feels like the mark on his face is a beacon, screaming 'look at me'. He closes the door softly behind himself when he reaches the war room and braces himself for the moment they turn and see him.

Judging by the look on Bozer's face, the bruise hadn't been visible last night, a small detail Mac is grateful for. That whole mess was humiliating enough, given how childishly he'd acted, how unsettling that experience must have been for Bozer to witness. If you'd mixed the obvious evidence that he had recently been hit hard enough to leave an injury behind into that, and he's sure there would have been no stopping Bozer from calling Jack. Then again, given the way his roommate's head snaps over to look at Jack immediately after seeing Mac, he seems to have done so anyway.

"Mac, your eye." It's Riley that speaks first. "What _happened_?"

Time seems to slow down, and Mac can't speak. He can talk around it all day long, avoid questions and dodge suspicion, distance himself from Jack's worry and protectiveness, but he can't lie to them. He can't look Riley in the eye, open his mouth, and spout some excruciatingly obvious bullshit line about walking into a cabinet door or getting nailed with an elbow in hand-to-hand combat practice.

Before he has to figure out what to say, how to somehow tell neither the truth nor an outright lie, the door swings open and all eyes are on Matty. She looks more rushed than usual, and does not move to put information up on the screens, or pause to exchange a pithy remark with Jack.

"You'll be briefed on the plane," she says, paused in the doorway and holding the door open. "We've gotta move."

Mac supposes he'll feel guilty for it later, but at the time all he feels is relief. If Matty is rushing them this seriously, things must be bad, and that also means that all attention is immediately off him. Everyone snaps quickly into movement, following Matty and listening to the Cliff's Notes version of events that she delivers en route to transport. Mac sees, as they're about to board the plane, Bozer pull Jack aside and exchange a few words, but no one mentions the mark on his face to him again.

The reprieve lasts the duration of the mission, but once their objective is completed, Mac knows it's only a matter of time. They've all been focused on the issue requesting their immediate attention, obviously, but there's no way the bruise has just been forgotten. Not with the way Jack's been watching him, the concerned looks Bozer and Riley have been directing at him when they think he won't notice. Once they're headed back to the plane, ready to settle in for the ride home, Mac knows what's about to happen.

As it has so often lately, unasked for and nine times out of ten unhelpful, James' voice springs into his mind. It was a familiar lecture, one Mac has heard several times when he'd mentioned wanting the opinion of someone from the Phoenix Foundation.

 _"I'm worried about you," James had said, "and your dependence on that team, especially Dalton."_

 _"What is that supposed to mean?" Mac responded, instantly on the defensive._

 _"I mean you talk about them constantly. You talk about those people like they're your family, Angus."_

 _"They are my-"_

 _"They're not," James cut him off, voice hard and serious. "I understand why you feel like that - trauma bonding is a powerful force. But you can't let the psychological effects of pulling each other out of the fire on a weekly basis trick you into thinking they're something more than they are. I know how it feels, I've been there too. I've had teams like that, a partner like that, but…" He trailed off, shook his head._

 _Mac had wanted to argue, to insist that they were more than his team and it wasn't because of some psychology trick, he loved them and they loved him. But try as he might, he couldn't get the words out. His side was pulsing in pain from just not an hour ago, when James had shoved him into the counter and held him there, and he'd been smacked over the head earlier that morning, leaving him nervy and on edge. It'd been the first time James had hit him twice in the same day, and there's no way of knowing if a third act of violence would follow._

 _"I'm just trying to help you," James said patiently. He looked like he meant it, too. "I don't want you to be destroyed when they move on - or when you do. And I'm trying to help you keep that from happening before it needs to. Your behavior, the way you_ get _sometimes…"_

 _"Dad," Mac couldn't help saying. He doesn't want to hear any more. It hurt too much, hurt worse than where he'd been shoved back into the counter. James kept going like he hadn't spoken at all._

 _"You're so reliant on Dalton, Angus, it's needy and unbecoming. How long do you really think he's gonna put up with this?"_

 _"He- Jack doesn't-"_

 _"You act up so damn much with_ me _, and I'm your_ father _. What is he that he's gonna deal with it forever? I'm just trying to help you."_

The memory burns like the bruise on Mac's face, like the one from that very night that sits hidden and fading under his shirt. It's all still burning when Jack finally does what Mac has been expecting since they got back on the plane - asks about his eye. How he goes about it, though… That Mac hadn't been expecting, and it catches him off guard.

"Is he taking you into the field?"

"What are you…" Mac stops when he realizes what's happened. He's been deflecting hard away from the problems with his father, diverting towards the mission, how exhausting, how stressful, how complicated it is to avoid anybody actually asking about James, and it seems to have worked a little too well. The mission has grown and grown until it's become a monster, a terrible and shadowed thing dragging him down and down while his team stood by unable to do anything without the right information to help him.

It feels like a lie, letting them believe it, but then again, maybe it's for the best.

"Is he making you go into the field with him? What happened to your face, is that because of him?"

An ounce too much and the scale of Mac's fragilely balanced composure breaks, splinters into pieces and lets a glimpse of what's boiling inside him out.

"I can't _talk about it!_ " he says, voice loud, louder than he'd meant it to be. Riley and Bozer's attention is on them now. The small plane is silent save for Mac's voice, shrill an octave above his usual tone.

"Mac," Jack tries, holding up a hand, but Mac can't let him get the question out, whatever it will be.

He's too scared that he'll answer, that Jack will ask exactly the wrong thing in exactly the right way and everything will come pouring out in front of him and Riley and Bozer and the sky at thirty thousand feet. And if Jack finds out what's been happening, what Mac's been _letting_ _happen_ , what he's been keeping secret, well, he'll never be able to look at Mac the same way again, and that's a thought he can't stand.

 _You're so reliant on Dalton, Angus, it's needy and unbecoming. How long do you really think he's gonna put up with this?_

How could Jack ever hold the same respect for him, the same affection, if he knew? The thought is terrifying, and the terror overwhelms him, and before he has time to think it through, Mac keeps talking, voice rising still higher.

"I keep _telling you,_ all of you, I cannot _talk_ about anything to do with the Agency or the project I'm- I _can't_ , so will you just stop. I can handle it, even if you don't trust me to, so just- Just _stop_ , Jack." The air feels heavy with the echo of the words, hanging between them, loud and almost frantic. Mac is half expecting Jack to yell back, to turn this into a fight, and the thought hurts. He doesn't want to fight with Jack. Not ever, but especially not now, and not about this.

But Jack doesn't yell back. He doesn't yell, or push, or drag out the issue. He just sits there, across from Mac, looking at him with a troubled expression. Somehow, this isn't much less upsetting than if he'd shouted in kind, and after a few seconds of eye contact, Mac can't stand to face him any more. He turns away, away from Jack, from the twin looks of shock on Riley and Bozer, and looks out the window. His chest feels tight and his shoulders are shaking.

Time stretches on, indistinct, untraceable.

In the window of the plane, with the night sky dark outside, Mac can just make out the vague, shadowed suggestion of a black eye that he'd shown up with that morning, and he wants to hit the person he sees in that reflection. The young man he sees looking back at him in that pane of glass is not someone he likes, and he's angry enough at himself to want to black his other eye, enough to understand what it was James saw that needed such a heavy hand to correct. Before the seething mass he can feel growing in his chest gets so big it overwhelms him, Mac looks sharply away from the window. He looks across from him instead. To Jack again.

Jack, who hasn't said a word since Mac's outburst. Jack, who at a contrast to the sick anger burning inward in Mac, doesn't seem mad at all. He just looks worried. He's got the same look on his face that he always does when he knows something's wrong and Mac's not talking - concern, suspicion, something tired.

The bruise aches, and Mac looks at Jack, and thinks, _I'm exhausting. I ignore your advice, I disobey orders, I'm rude, I'm arrogant, I don't ever tell you what you need to know never mind what you want to know. The way I just spoke to you was terrible. I'm so much damn work all the time, and somehow, you've never…_

 _How many times have you wanted to teach me a lesson? Finally make me shut up and listen to you?_

 _What's stopped you?_

"Mac?" The question is soft, gentle, diametrically opposed to the one thudding around Mac's head. Jack's looking at him. He's been staring, and Jack's noticed, seen whatever expression is on his face, and now he's worried all over again, even more now. "What's on your mind, kid?"

 _I was wondering why the hell you haven't hit me yet, because I'm_ impossible _and I'm like this all the time and it's been_ years _. It took my dad less than a quarter of one to get tired of my shit._

As soon as the thought crosses his mind, Mac wishes he could take it back. His eyes go even wider, still staring, and his mouth opens slightly. No words come out. He can't think of anything to say, because he can't say what he'd been thinking, can't admit the indefensible thing he'd just thought. If he'd been angry with himself before, there are no words to describe the white hot fury carbonizing his lungs now.

Even the thought, the vague suggestion that Jack might have actually wanted to hit him, it's unforgivable. Jack would never, _could_ never hurt him like that, and Mac knows it would put a knife straight through Jack's heart to know he'd thought even for a moment it was a possibility. Acid burns the back of his throat, and Mac swallows hard to avoid physically being sick.

"Mac?"

Right, there had been a question, hadn't there? What was on his mind.

"Nothing." Nothing Jack can ever, ever know about. "Sorry." It's as close to an apology as Mac can get without explaining what he's apologizing for, the terrible, silent thing he's just done.

Jack loves him. Mac knows this, Jack has ensured a thousand different ways that he knows. But, well. James loves him too, or at least claimed to a handful of times. It's all just so confusing.

With Jack, love always meant safety, the absolute knowledge that the man would never, no matter the defiance, the disregarding of orders, the arrogance, _anything_ , get so angry with Mac as to hit him for it. With James… With James, love is something different. Something somehow both conditional and obligatory. Something weaponized and frightening. The different meanings, the dual definitions, they've mixed and muddled each other until Mac doesn't know which way is up, and love isn't enough to mean safe anymore.

Guilt-sick and thrown so far off balance he doesn't even know what balance is any more, Mac leans his head against the window, and tries to get some rest.

When the plane lands, and the four of them move to disembark, Jack has had a lot of time to think. He's had time to process what was said, what wasn't, the answers he still doesn't have, the absolutely wrecked look on Mac's face that came seemingly out of nowhere. After carefully going through what he knows, he's come to the conclusion that this, whatever this is, has to end, and it has to end yesterday. And there's only one person he can think of who would be able to head things off at the pass.

With the resolve of where he's going firmly set, Jack bids his goodbyes to the as yet still shellshocked Riley and Bozer, then turns to do the same with Mac. He means to act like things are, for the most part, normal, and goes to give the kid a pat on the back, squeeze his shoulder, bestow some amount of affection on him to reinforce that there are no hard feelings, no hurt held onto from Mac's outburst on the plane. When he raises his hand, however, something happens that takes him a few seconds, long after Mac's turned and bolted, to figure out.

When Mac saw the hand, he'd lurched back. It was barely any movement at all, just a few centimeters, a widening of his eyes, a complete arrest of his breathing. A flinch. Jack had gone to touch him, a completely casual gesture he must have repeated countless times in a constant effort to combat how completely touch-starved the kid is, and Mac had _flinched_.

"How well do you really know James MacGyver?"

The question is out before Matty's office door has hardly closed behind him. She picks her gaze up off the form in front of her and raises an eyebrow.

"Hello to you too," she says, though it lacks the genuineness and underlying mirth of their usual sparring. "Why do you ask?"

"You know exactly why I ask, Matty. You saw him today, you saw his face. He's hurt. Mac is getting _hurt_ on whatever mission his piece of shit father is dragging him out on, the Agency or _whoever_ is clearly not protecting him, and it's gotta stop. There has to be someone you can call to get a read on what's going on and make it stop."

Matty sets down her pen. Her face is deadly serious, had gone that way as soon as James' name came up, and the frown has only deepened as Jack talked.

"What you need to understand," she says, "is that at our _most_ paranoid, the Foundation isn't a _tenth_ as secretive as the Agency is. I know the Director, and the Deputies, of which James is one of several. I can't just call them up and demand details of an ongoing plan." Before Jack can say anything, she continues. "Hang on, I'm not done. I can't demand details of an ongoing Agency operation, but what I _can_ demand is a briefing on the role of a Phoenix Foundation consult. For all that they are cloak and dagger to a truly excessive degree, I've never known the Director to disregard protocol. If I go to her, she'll have to tell me about what one of my agents is doing over there."

"So we can find out what Mac is doing for them, even if they won't tell us about James' operation," Jack summarizes, and Matty nods.

"I think you're right," she says. "For what it's worth, I think you're exactly right. I've had my eye on him too, and there's something very wrong going on with your boy."

Feeling like all the air has gone out of him, Jack sinks down into a chair across the desk from Matty. He takes a deep breath and scrubs his hands over his face, shaking his head.

"He flinched, Matty," he mutters into his palms.

"What?"

"I tried to touch him and he _flinched_ ," Jack repeats, looking back up, though not at her. His eyes roam out over her desk, around the books lining one wall of the office. "He's never… I have never, when he has been aware enough to know it was me, seen him flinch before. Whatever's happened to him on this mission, whatever James," he spits the name like it burns him to say, "has him doing out there. It's hurting him, he's _hurt_ , and I… I can't…"

"We're gonna figure this out. I'll make some calls, and we'll find out once and for all exactly what it is the Agency is doing with Mac. Hey." She catches his eyes, waits until Jack is looking right at her to go on, voice as sure and steady as she always is when things go off the rails. It's comforting, and it makes him want to believe her when she continues. "We're gonna figure this out. They may not be protecting him, but we sure as hell will. I promise."


	9. Chapter 9

Be patient just a moment longer, I promise it's all about to come spilling out into the open. In the meantime, I hope you all don't kill me when you get to the end of this one.

About three, maybe four more chapters to go! Thanks for sticking with me.

(warning: scenes of/mentions of abuse, emotional/psychological/physical, though less than in previous chapters.)

* * *

When Matty bid Jack a solemn goodbye at her office door, it had been with the caution that answers may not come right away. She'd said with a disbelieving and annoyed shake of her head that it was almost like the Agency went to every extent possible to create morebureaucratic red tape than already existed. It might, she'd warned, take several days for the disclosure request to even process with their version of Oversight.

Therefore, Jack is not expecting to be woken first thing the very next morning by a phone call from Matty, telling him to get in, 'now'. He rushes in as quickly as he can, making record time from his apartment to Matty's office. The woman is on her feet when he gets there, pacing the length of the room and radiating agitation. It's just about the least professional Matty has ever looked, and that is enough to send a renewed jolt of fear through him.

"What is it?" Jack asks, his anxious voice sounding too loud in the relative silence of the office. "What did they say? Who'd you talk to? If it was James, don't believe him, whatever he said, you can't-"

"I spoke personally with the Agency's Director," Matty interrupts. She's stilled now beside her desk, arms folded and face creased in a frown.

A thousand worst-case scenarios spin around Jack's head at once, and it all combines into an indecipherable nightmare of fear. He can't stop seeing the bruise on Mac's face, the flinch when Jack had tried to touch him. It's the first injury Jack has seen on him, but it's hard not to look back and see a pattern. The odd way Mac has alternatingly stuck close and grown distant over the past couple months, spending just _so much time_ with James, his exhaustion, the extra risks he's been taking on missions…

"You were right," Matty says, breaking into Jack's spiraling thoughts. "Nothing about this is on the up-and-up."

There are some things in life you just don't want to be right about. This is one of these things. Jack nods shortly, trying to forestall panic. _There are no details yet_ , he reminds himself. _You don't actually know anything yet._

"So, what'd they tell you about the op? I thought you said it'd be a few days. What happened to 'it'll take time'? Not that I'm complaining, but…" Sometimes, fast answers mean worse answers. This feels like one of those times too.

"That's only if you're requesting information on an actual Agency operation," Matty says, her voice deadly serious and undercut with ice. Before Jack can snap at her to get to the point already, she goes on. "The Director has dismissed my request for oversight privileges on my agent's involvement in an Agency mission on the grounds that they have absolutely no record of a Phoenix Foundation consultant on any active assignment."

"Well they're lying," Jack concludes immediately. "Shady group like that, we can just take their word for it? No way."

"I don't think that's the case." With a shake of her head, Matty looks out across her office. She doesn't seem to be looking at anything in particular. It seems like the aimless staring at nothing a person does when they are sifting through memory, flipping a mental Rolodex for pertinent information. "They're the most secretive people I've ever dealt with, that's true, but they've always followed inter-agency protocol to the letter. And besides, when I spoke to her, the Director's response gave me the distinct impression she had no idea what I was talking about. Not just about our MacGyver's involvement in their MacGyver's mission, but in general."

"Which means…" says Jack slowly. He has a pretty good idea what that means, but he needs to hear Matty say it.

"Either James has gone rogue and is conducting an off the books, unsanctioned mission the Agency isn't aware of, or he's playing some kind of game with Mac."

"Gotta be the first option." The assertion is quick and sure. Matty looks like she agrees with him. "We both saw his face yesterday. James has to be taking him into the field. You don't get bruises like that from mind-games."

"I think you're right. James also isn't the type to just mess with someone like that. I wouldn't put it past him to test someone, especially his son, but he wouldn't do it for no reason. He'd do it in the course of achieving an objective. He'd make it useful." Matty's face twists further, dislike clear and undisguised in her expression. "James doesn't do things without a purpose. He's a pragmatist."

"A pragmatist," Jack repeats. He's got no idea what sort of man James MacGyver is, aside from the kind who would effectively orphan his elementary school aged child. They've barely interacted since the man's reappearance, and it's just one of many things about him that makes Jack nervous. They don't know each other at all. Matty on the other hand… "What else? You know him. What's your read on this?"

"I don't know him, not well."

Jack frowns deeper. "He's saved your life. You said so yourself. He's saved you a couple of times."

"That he has," she agrees with a bitter, cold smile. It's barely a smile at all. More of a grimace. It sets Jack's teeth on edge. "But I wouldn't say I know him beyond that. He's a hard man to get to know. I tried, over the years. I knew he had a son, and that was just about the most personal thing I ever knew about him. He never talked about Mac. I don't think I remember him even mentioning the kid's name. Not until, well."

"Until we started here."

She nods. "Exactly. That's the first time he ever talked about Mac, at least to me. Before that… James was never much for personal conversation. Like I said, pragmatist. The man saved my life but he made it very clear he felt I owed him for it. We weren't friends."

The twisted sick feeling in Jack's gut gets worse. He wants Mac here, within eyesight, now. He knows, _knows_ the kid's with James now, and if it weren't for the fact that he doesn't know where James lives, Jack would be extremely tempted to go and get him right now, interfering be damned, micromanaging be damned, _helicopter_ _parenting_ be damned.

"Not a nice guy, then," he mutters, rubbing at the back of his neck with one restless hand. It's posture mirroring how he'd sat last night, also nauseated by worry, describing to Matty how Mac had flinched away from him.

"Not somebody I would want around my family," Matty says. There's something pointed in her voice, and Jack is pretty sure he knows what it is.

"I have to tell Mac," Jack says quietly, tilting his head up and looking at the ceiling like he'll find answers there. There are none to be found. It's just a ceiling, like every other ceiling. "He might hate me for it, think I'm trying to… I don't know. Get between him and his dad. Y'know, for a minute there, I thought maybe I was trying to find a reason to, that I was… I ignored things I shouldn't have, and now…"

"And now you know there's something wrong for sure, and you can do something about it," Matty finishes for him firmly. He glances over at her. She's looking at him with empathy in her eyes at the same time as there is a firm set to her jaw. It's a face that says 'I get it, I do, but you need to cut it out with the pity party and get yourself together'. "He might react badly, but he needs to know. He's in danger, and you need to protect him. Even if it makes him so pissed he won't look at you."

She's right, of course. It's nothing Jack didn't already know, but there's something to be said for hearing it out loud from someone else, someone whose opinion he holds in the highest esteem.

"Okay," he sighs, getting up. "Okay. He's with James now, I'll try giving him a call. If he doesn't answer, I'll tell Bozer to let me know as soon as he gets home." He hardly answers when he's with James, but who knows, maybe the universe will decide to throw Jack a mulligan for once in this whole mess. Getting up to leave, he pauses when he's almost to the door, turning back to her.

"What is it?" Matty asks, and there's kindness tinging the edges of the impatient question.

"I need to know that you- That if-" he says, voice soft and unsure. Jack can hear the almost-tremble in his own words, and he can't find it in himself to steady them. He stops and breathes for a moment, trying to figure out how to say this. "If, when I tell him what we know about James, about the mission, if he gets mad, if he's, what'd you say? If he's so pissed he won't look at me, I need to know you'll let him know you're there for him, that he's got somebody he can lean on. Finding out James is lying, it's gonna… It'll hurt him, and if he feels that hurt by being mad at me, that's fine. But he needs _someone_. Bozer and Riley will be there, obviously, but there should be… He's gonna need…" He's gonna need a parent, too, Jack doesn't say.

Matty hears it anyway, and she dips her chin in agreement. Her face has gone soft, and she nods again. "I will. He'll know, I promise. And Jack?"

"Yeah?"

"Get that man away from our family."

It's his turn to nod, and with that, Jack leaves. _I'm gonna try,_ he thinks, the door closing softly behind him.

* * *

"I don't think you understand," Mac says, pointing at the schematic up on the board. "If we send the agent through like this, they'll be caught at the fourth sublevel West hallway, and it's game over."

"Oh, I do understand." Again, James isn't looking at him, a common thread when they're focused on a specific part of the plan. "That's the point."

"The _point_ is the agent will get caught? That doesn't make any sense, dad, why would you-"

"Because the objective is this office, Angus," James says, voice short and annoyed. He jabs a finger at the laminated map pinned to the board, smudging the edge of a word scrawled in erasable felt pen. It's impossible for Mac to reign in the flinch at the sudden, quick movement, and he only hopes James hadn't noticed. "The encryption key is in there."

"Yes, dad, I know that," Mac mumbles, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. The pressure aggravates the bruise around his eye, and he pulls his hands away. The small smudge in the green marker labeling the office is bothering him, and he itches to fix it, though he knows the action would be ill received. "But if the agent gets _caught_ , then-"

"Then they'll be brought directly to the man in charge, the man this office belongs to." Again, James is talking to him like he's stupid, slow and annoyed, an edge to the words.

"And _killed_. They'll be brought to him and-"

"For god's sake, Angus, let me _finish_." The snap has Mac's mouth shutting immediately, teeth clicking audibly. James spends a second longer glaring at him, then turns back to the map. "And _interrogated_. They'll be brought to that man and interrogated, because what that man likes more than anything is a puzzle. If our agent gets caught before here-" James jabs at a point much earlier in the infiltration schematic, and Mac fights the urge to take a giant step back, "-then they'll be killed immediately. If our agent gets caught after here-" another point, this time at a spot almost to the center of the compound, "-then it's too close, and nobody will bother calling the boss. But here-" an indication of the place Mac had pointed out, the place where their whole plan falls apart, "-if our operative is caught _here_ , then, well. Then they're far enough to be interesting, but not far enough to be an immediate threat. And viola, we're in."

"That's…" Ridiculous. Nonsensical. Reckless. Insane. "That's so, _so_ dangerous."

"It's a dangerous job," James says with a small wave of his fingers, dismissing the concern out of hand. "Our agents knew that when they signed on with us."

"But-"

"But _nothing_. This is how we're doing it."

"I can't be part of this," Mac insists, raising his voice to demand being heard. His hands are trembling, adrenaline spiking at standing up to James. There's already a dangerous look in the man's eyes, a look that says _watch it, son, I'm warning you_. "I can't be part of a plan that's deliberately getting someone caught when we have other options, way less dangerous ones. Look, if we just-"

Before he can finish his explanation, a hand seizes the sleeve of where his arm is stretched out. Mac's eyes snap shut and he braces himself, but no pain follows. He opens his eyes hesitantly, to see James looking at him with disdain, still holding onto the long-sleeved t-shirt he's wearing, just like ones he's been wearing all the time since James started being less careful about where on Mac's arms he grabbed hard enough to leave marks.

"I think," James says, voice measured in a way that means Mac is treading on thin ice, "you need to take a walk. Cool your heels, think this over _rationally_ , come back inside when you've got some _sense_ , got it?" He releases Mac's sleeve with a shove towards the door, causing him to stumble backwards and nearly trip over the edge of the carpet.

It's not worth arguing over, and he suddenly finds he would indeed appreciate some distance from this particular conversation. Mac walks out the door, closing it carefully behind him. James doesn't like slammed doors, and what counts as 'slammed' changes day by day.

Not two blocks away from his dad's house, wandering aimlessly in an attempt to figure out what he's going to do to get James to change his mind, to not put this agent at risk like this, Mac's phone rings. He fishes it out of his pocket, his chest constricting when he sees the name on the screen.

 _Jack Dalton_

Instinct has him looking around, checking to see if James is watching. Mac admonishes himself immediately afterwards, feeling stupid and paranoid. He's on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood, outside of the house, and there's no reason to assume at all that James would be able to see him, and no reason Mac needs his permission to talk to his partner anyway. It's his phone, his phone-call, he'll answer it if he wants to. Feeling a spike of rebellious irritation, he answers the phone.

"Hey Jack," he says, and he'd be worried about how the words had come out half exhausted half annoyed if it weren't for what Jack says immediately after.

"We need to talk about your dad, kid."

 _He knows_. The thought screams through Mac's head. _He knows. He knows. He knows._

"What about him?" Mac asks, pulse rushing in his ears, under the continuing chorus. He knows. He knows.

"This mission he's got you on-" the flood of relief is instantaneous, even as Mac feels guilty, wonders if the way they all believe this is just about a mission counts as lying, "-it's… It's not what you think it is."

Mac stops dead on the sidewalk, his resumed pacing halted still. A jogger behind him calls out a surprised warning, barely dodging before she'd have run right into him. Mac barely notices.

"What are you talking about, Jack?"

"Matty called the Agency. I'm sorry, buddy, I know you wanted us to stay out of it, but after you showed up with that- I've gotta keep you safe. That's my job, right? I keep you safe. And whatever you're doing on this mission was getting you hurt, so I had to have Matty do what she could to talk to your old man's people. Just so we could have some kind of oversight, some say in things."

It's classic Jack, it's nothing Mac shouldn't've seen coming, but he still somehow finds himself stunned silent. He can't think of a single thing to say, so he says nothing, listens to Jack keep talking.

"You said we couldn't know, you couldn't talk to us, because the Agency has rules, but the mission's not sanctioned."

All the air leaves Mac's lungs in a rush. He feels suddenly dizzy, and he looks around for a bench, something, otherwise afraid he'll end up sitting on the curb, on his knees in the grass.

"What? Wh- _What_?"

"The Agency has no record of your dad's mission, or your involvement in any Agency business. I'm sorry, but whatever James told about who's giving the orders here, it's not true. He's gone rogue, set the whole thing up himself. Whatever he's doing, it isn't for them. He lied to you."

 _He lied to you_. It hits Mac in the chest like a cartoon anvil has been dropped on him from a great height, like he's been punched hard enough to leave his ribs fractured and his lungs bruised. _He lied to you_. Because Jack wouldn't. No matter how many reservations he had about James, no matter how much he worried or disapproved of the man, he wouldn't make something like this up. He wouldn't lie to Mac, not about this.

James, though… There's nothing in Mac telling him the same thing about his father.

"He…" Mac can't finish the sentence. "Jack…"

"I know, Mac, I know." There's apology in Jack's voice. Fear, too, though of what, Mac isn't certain. He can't decipher it right now. "Look, I-"

"I gotta go," interrupts Mac abruptly. His pulse is galloping, and there's an anger building in him that's burning so hot he's afraid he might explode. "I have to- I gotta talk to dad."

"Mac, listen to me for a second." Jack's voice comes fast and urgent through the speaker, insistent enough that Mac stops, halfway through turning to head back down the sidewalk towards James' house. "Be careful. I mean it, kid, be careful. Remember what I said, you're in danger you _call me_. Promise me. Please."

Silence. Birds, in a bush somewhere. A man on a telephone on the porch of a house across the street. A dog barking a block away.

"Mac. _Promise_ me."

"...Okay. I promise." The phone is halfway down, Mac's thumb hovering over the 'end call' button, when he suddenly jerks it back up, saying in a rush, hopeful and uncertain, "Jack?"

"Yeah? What is it?"

"I don't… Depending on what he has to say, I- Will you come and get me? He picked me up, and I- I don't-"

"Of course. Just send me the address and I'm there. You know I'm there, the second you call."

It's not a lot, it doesn't ease the burden of what Mac knows he's about to do, the hell he's inviting on himself when he confronts James about this, but it's something. It's something he can hold onto if he feels like he's about to lose his nerve. Jack is coming. He just has to finish this conversation, and Jack is coming for him. Just one conversation, albeit the hardest conversation he's ever even _thought_ about having, and it'll be over.

(Maybe the whole thing will be over, depending on what James has to say for himself, maybe this whole ordeal, the hitting, the unpredictable anger, the belittling and shame, maybe it'll all finally be _over_ and no one will ever even have to know.)

"Thanks," he says into the phone, barely above a whisper.

Whatever Jack says in response, Mac doesn't hear it, already lowering the cell. There's just a faint rumble of a familiar, comforting voice. With a shaking finger, Mac ends the call and shoves the phone back in his pocket. The walk back to James' house seems to pass by in a blink. He doesn't knock, just opens the door and walks in.

"I need an explanation," he says, voice uncontrolled in volume and pitch. Mac stares across the room at James, tremors running through the set of his shoulders every couple of seconds. "I need you to tell me the truth, dad. _Now_."


	10. Chapter 10

Hopefully now some questions will be answered! Thanks as always for your awesome comments, I love to hear what you're thinking, predicting, and enjoying about the fic.

(warning: emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. be careful, as this chapter contains the most extreme/explicit violence in the entire fic. also, stronger language.)

* * *

 _"I need an explanation. I need you to tell me the truth, dad_. Now."

There is something almost satisfying in how, for the first time he can remember, James is completely taken aback, thrown by what Mac said. He recovers quickly, though, straightening his spine and leveling Mac with his best exasperated look.

"You're gonna have to skip the melodrama and tell me what you mean," he drawls. There's a hint of an eye-roll and a scoff in the words, if not externally displayed. "Tell you the truth about _what_? I've answered every question you've had for me, I don't see a reason for you to be so hostile right now. Try asking again, like an adult."

The tremors seizing Mac across the shoulders grow stronger, though the nature of the shaking changes. It's a lot of things, the turmoil coursing through him, but at the moment, with James' condescending voice continuing the constant stream of second-guessing and belittling criticism that started months ago and hasn't let up since, anger has taken the lead.

Anger has been there the whole time of course, anger for for how James left, how close he'd been the whole time, his behavior since his return. Anger for the distance created between himself and his team, between himself and Jack specifically. More than the physical violence, the pain he's caused and the bruises left by his hands, Mac is angry about having to hide it, for how he feels like he's been lying to the people he loves most in the world since the word 'go'.

And now, if what Jack told him over the phone is to be believed, and Mac can't imagine he's lying about this, it turns out James has been lying to him from the start. This project, the big draw for them to spend time together, the crucial mission so many lives rested on, it was all a lie, and Mac feels so angry he can hardly bear it. Anger has overpowered the fear that's grown to grip him every time he so much as thinks about James, and the need for answers is stronger than the fear of the consequences of asking.

"You lied to me," Mac says, and the accusation is freeing. It lays out the core of what's been happening between them, a slightly altered, off-center confession. _You hurt me. You've been hurting me_. "The mission, the plan, none of it was true. Don't even bother denying it. I talked to Jack, I know it's not Agency sanctioned. I know your organization doesn't even know you're doing this, that we're doing this.

James takes a step forward, and all of Mac's training, his instincts, his ability to read a situation, it's all telling him one thing. _You're in danger. Get out_. But Mac stubbornly grits his teeth and holds his ground. He's not leaving here without answers.

"Jack," James repeats, voice low and dangerous. "You've been talking to Dalton? You ran to _him_ with this?"

The image evoked of the schoolyard tattletale, the pathetic kid so dependent on someone he can't do anything by himself, it makes Mac bristle.

"I didn't _run_ to _anyone_ ," he snaps, ignoring the little voice in his head taunting him with how much he'd wanted to, with how hard he'd had to fight with his own desire to show up at Jack's apartment in the middle of the night after his father had laid into him with words or hands. There were some days it had been bad enough that Mac could hardly look at the person in his life who most greatly represented safety, the promise of being cared for and protected, without wanting to spill everything or break down into explanation-less sobbing. But he hadn't. No matter how hard all that had been, he _hadn't_.

(Maybe he should have. If he had, it never would've got this far. The only reason it's gotten as bad as it has is because Mac let it. It's his fault, isn't it, for letting it continue?)

"Dad," Mac starts, but is quickly interrupted.

"Be quiet a moment." James is squinting at him now, shrewd and accusing. There's something about the way he's standing, how his posture has changed, that makes Mac feel like the conversation has shifted onto increasingly unstable ground. "If you didn't run to Dalton, how did he know about this? How would he know the Agency didn't sanction this operation if you didn't tell him about it?"

"I…" It's a question he hadn't asked when they'd spoken on the phone, overtaken by other, seemingly more urgent priorities. "I don't know. I'm guessing he talked to Mat- to Director Webber and she called the Agency. She has the authority to do that, she's the Director of the Foundation."

"And _why_ ," says James with a hint of a dangerous tone in his voice, "was he talking to Webber. How did he know to talk to her?"

Mac feels like they're rapidly losing the thread of this conversation. He was supposed to be the one asking the questions, not stuck feeling like he's on the wrong end of an interrogation, like he's about to be found guilty.

"He was worried," he explains, voice rising back into annoyance again, reminded of why he's here. He's here because his father lied to him, and now he's being scolded for how he had in turn lied to his friends, his family, to cover for what James had been doing to him. "Jack's my partner, it's his job to protect me, and when I started acting off he got worried. Riley and Bozer saw it too, because they care about me, and they notice that kind of thing. So when they asked, I just kept saying it was the mission. That I was tired because of the mission, stressed over the mission, I just kept saying the _mission_. So it blew up until they thought you'd involved me in something really bad. I _lied_ to them. That's why Jack went to her."

"And why the hell would you do that instead of just keeping your mouth shut?"

Somehow, it still sounds like Mac's fault. He's standing there, in his father's living room, telling the man how covering for how James hurt him had led his team to contact the Agency, exposing his lies, and still, it's all coming out sounding like Mac's fault.

"What was I supposed to do, tell him the truth about..." _About the abuse?_ The words stick in Mac's throat, completely unwilling the come out. For lack of being able to verbally finish making his point, he merely gestures upward, a wordless indication of the faint bruising still decorating his face.

James' response indicates no embarrassment at the consequences of his actions, the evidence that he'd hit his son hard enough to leave a mark. No embarrassment, no remorse, not a hint of guilt. Just annoyance, and disappointment.

"What you were _supposed_ to do is not be such a child about this," he barks. Mac flinches, which serves to anger James further. "See, that's what I mean. If you hadn't let yourself get so affected by a couple of reprimands then there wouldn't've been a need to say anything to them at all. I've done nothing I wasn't well within my rights to do, and if you hadn't overreacted, if you had just-"

"Dad-"

"I'm not finished, not until you know what you did." James is standing perfectly still, staring at Mac straight on. Somehow, the icy calm on his face is more frightening than if he'd been pacing and screaming, throwing things and breaking furniture. "Because the mission may not have been sanctioned but the problem facing the Agency is very, very real. The encryption key is real, so is the man who has it, and so are the people who will die if he figures out what it is."

True or not, it still doesn't explain the lies, why they'd apparently been working behind the Agency's back this whole time. Mac can't help but mention as much.

"So why didn't you just figure it out with your team at the Agency, your partner or whoever?" There's still so much of this that doesn't make sense to Mac, so many pieces he can't sort out.

When James explains, cracks the whole thing wide open and exposes what'd lain underneath, Mac wishes he still didn't know. Sometimes, knowing is worse.

"It wasn't just a mission, not just a plan to solve a problem. It was your resume."

"My…" Mac shakes his head, uncomprehending.

"Oh for- The Agency, we don't run things like the Phoenix Foundation does. Or the FBI, or whoever. We don't train green agents. We don't like to waste that kind of time. When the Agency recruits, it does so exclusively from other existing agencies."

The pieces fall into place with a dizzying suddenness.

"You wanted me to come work for the Agency," Mac says slowly, and James nods emphatically.

"It could've been perfect, son." James' voice is almost grieved, regretful like he's lost something amazing, a once in a lifetime chance. "This plan, it would've been your ticket in. They'd have seen what you can do, seen what we can do together, and they'd have forgiven my going under the radar to set it all up and invited you on in a heartbeat. Hell, they'd probably have let you take the lead on the retrieval."

"And you didn't… You didn't think to ask _me_ if this is what _I_ wanted?" Of all the things James has done, this one reaches a truly new level of egregious. He's clearly, not for a moment, given a single thought as to what Mac would want, whether he would be on board with this. "You think I want to leave my team, my partner, my family, and come work for you at an Agency I know nothing about?"

"I'm your _father_." The way James says it makes it sound like an obvious answer, "You're my son. _My_ son, _my_ family. You only get one family in this life, and whether you like it or not, and you and me, we're it. I know I left, and I shouldn't have done that, but it's time to let it _go_. There will be other teams, other partners, but I am your only father. But now, well, now, because you had to go and tell them all about our plan, it's over. It's all over."

"I didn't tell-"

"Angus, be _quiet_ ," James says, abruptly loud and harsh. The calm of before is gone, evaporated into thin air. "Do as you're told for once in your life. My career is done, hear me? Done. We were so close. If I'd been able to give them a finished plan, a completely airtight solution to getting that encryption key back, they'd have had no choice but to listen to me and take you on. We could've made the perfect team, you could've made the perfect agent, hell, maybe even better than me. We'd have been together, son. You and me, just like we should've been all along. Instead, you… You ruined everything. It's over for me at the agency. I'm finished."

"I didn't mean to-" Mac tries. He's stopped by a swift, sharp gesture it takes several seconds to process as just that, a gesture, not a backhand headed straight for his face.

"You have _no idea_ what you've done. No idea…" James shakes his head and turns away, standing for the moment still, looking away out the window into the back yard. His hands, hanging by his sides, are clenched into fists.

It's with a shock that Mac realizes he has no idea what James is going to do to him. He's pushed the envelope, hard, and he's smart enough to know how a pattern of violence escalates. James may be quiet across from him, but it's not going to last.

 _Remember what I said, you're in danger you_ call me _. Promise me. Please._

Concentrating on keeping his hand still and his movements innocuous, Mac pulls his phone out of his pocket. He's shared his location to Jack, and is half-way through typing a message when the device is suddenly yanked out of his hands.

"What the hell's the matter with you? You texting _Dalton_ right now? To what…" James squints at the screen. "To come and _get you?_ " He takes a threatening step forward, hand already beginning to raise as he moves.

James has hit him before. He's slapped Mac across the face, cuffed him over the head, knocked him into tables, grabbed him and shaken him, there have been more than a dozen individual incidences of physical violence that Mac can identify since that first snap. James has hit him before, several times, but this is different. This isn't about teaching him a lesson, a correction for a mistake or for being stupid or naive. This is not going to be like all the other times, where James will impress the point upon him and then they'll move on. This is the first time Mac has known James was setting out with the intent to hurt him.

Maybe this is why, when Mac moves to take his phone back, and James' hand locks onto his wrist, bruisingly tight and preventing him from moving, he can't help the words that jolt out of his mouth.

"Dad, _don't_. Please don't."

 _Don't what? Don't hit me? Don't hurt me?_

It's only the second time Mac has risked asking his father directly to stop.

They'd been in roughly this same position too, standing in James' living room with his raised forearm seized in a ruthlessly careless grip. It'd been just after a mission on which Mac has gotten hurt.

 _Mac jumped._

 _The mission was a success and he walked away with a badly twisted wrist. They made it back to the plane without incident or conversation, and Mac's anxiety mounted with the pain in his arm. Jack was pissed, and he knew it, and he was sure he was about to catch hell over the choice he'd made, as soon as they're settled. Jack had shouted at him not to do it, over the headset, reminded him there was another way, said it explicitly, 'don't move'._

 _And Mac had jumped anyway._

 _When the plane took off, as soon as they were settled on their way home, Jack moved his seat, sitting down directly across from Mac. Mac cringed. He gritted his teeth, fighting down the urge to fidget, and braced himself for a loud, angry lecture about recklessness and doing as he was told. Jack studied his face for a long moment._

 _"Give me your hand," is what he'd said._

 _Mac blinked, confused. "What?" It was not what he was expecting Jack to say, and not in the tone he'd been expecting to hear it in. Jack spoke softly and his voice, like the lines around his eyes, was tired._

 _With a split second, shameful hesitation, instinctively pulling his injured limb close to his chest before he realized what he was doing, Mac blushed. It's Jack. He had no reason to be wary of Jack. There was anger in him, sure, Mac knew there was, but Jack would never hurt him._

You thought the same thing about James _, an insidious voice whispered in the back of his mind. Mac ignored it and extended his arm. It's not even remotely the same thing._

 _Jack's fingers, closing around his forearm above the wrist, avoiding the damage, loose and gentle. He held Mac's arm carefully, turning it to evaluate the injured wrist. Mac silently allowed Jack to manipulate the arm, to wrap a palm around the back of his hand, guiding his fingers closed into a fist and back open again. The movement caused a fresh spike of pain through damaged tissue, and Mac couldn't stop the small noise he made. Jack stopped what he was doing immediately, his thumb smoothing feather-light over the bone of his wrist in apology._

 _Jack hadn't yelled. He hadn't shouted or towered over Mac, hadn't done any of the things James would do. This more than anything made Mac feel even worse. How Jack had only looked at him with frustration and worry and some kind of heartache._

 _When he reached his father's house the next day, James' attention zeroed in on Mac's wrist immediately. The official diagnosis was a mild sprain, and the brace he'd been coerced into wearing through the cooperative efforts of Jack and the Phoenix's medical staff was not subtle. He was hardly inside with the door shut behind him before James was moving. Mac barely stifled the urge to lurch back and away out of his reach._

 _James grabbed his forearm and pulled his wrist up into view. The grip he had on Mac was tight and hard, sending pain shooting through the already damaged arm._

 _"Dad," Mac said, the word pulled out of him without thought, an instinctive, automatic attempt at alerting James to the consequences of his actions._ You're hurting me. Stop, it hurts.

 _"What'd you do to yourself this time?" There was concern in James' voice, sure, but it's overshadowed by disapproval. Even James' wording betrayed his primary focus._

 _"There was an accident on the mission, I had to make a judgement call," Mac explained, voice controlled and steady. "I picked a course of action that promised the greatest chance of success."_

 _"So you were playing with fire and took a stupid risk," James said. His grip tightened fractionally and Mac winced. He twisted his arm a bit, trying to escape James' hold. Without knowing it, James had grabbed Mac's arm over the same place Jack had touched him, and the difference is striking. There was none of the extreme gentleness Jack had shown, the care towards not causing Mac any further suffering in his examination. James was gripping him like a defective object, twisting his arm carelessly to see the brace from another angle._

 _"Dad," Mac said again, louder._ You're hurting me.

 _James either didn't notice or didn't care that he'd said anything at all, just pulled Mac over into the light of a lamp next to the table. It was one step too far, a sharp shock of white-hot pain shooting through his wrist, and the words actually made it out that time._

 _"Dad, you're hurting me, stop."_

 _James had let go. Just like that, James let go._

'Stop. Don't.' He hadn't said it before or since. Maybe because he was afraid of what it would feel like to tell his father 'please stop' and have James ignore him. Because that would mean James knew. As long as he doesn't ask for it to stop, as long as he doesn't name what's happening, Mac can tell himself James doesn't know what he's doing, that he doesn't quite realize how what he's doing his hurting his son.

That first time, it worked, and James stopped, let him go immediately.

It doesn't work like that this time. When James' hold only hardens, panic sends Mac's free hand up, grabbing at his father's sleeve in an attempt to dislodge him. James responds by seizing his other wrist, now gripping both of his arms, and slamming him hard back into the wall. Mac's head bounces off the unassuming beige paint and his ears ring with the force of the impact.

"So that's it, huh?" James says in a raised voice, and Mac, mind swimming, can't do anything but fight to draw in breath. "You're just gonna ruin my career, my _life_ , and then text the fucking surrogate you latched onto because you couldn't make it on your own to come _save_ _you_ when things get a little tough? That's what you're gonna do?"

Mac's head hits the wall again when James jars him, punctuating the demanding questions with a rough shake.

"Answer me. _Answer me_ , Angus, you _answer me_ when I speak to you or I spear to god…"

But he can't, he just can't. Mac can't speak. Even if he could, he had no idea what to say. All that makes it out is a soft, strangled whine. A whimper, pathetic and wounded.

One of the hands holding his wrists releases, only to flash up and across so fast Mac barely registers it, only the pain it leaves behind, the burst of shrieking nerves followed by the drip of blood down his chin from his newly split lip. The grip on his arm returns twice as hard as it was before, and the bones in his wrist ache.

James is shouting something, loud and furious, and Mac can't process a word of it. His ears are ringing, from the impact of his head against the wall, the fist across his face, the sheer overwhelming terror of the situation, it's all taking up too much space to allow for anything else. The heaving of his chest has grown frantic, breathing in short, erratic pants. He's been scared of James before, but never like this, never with the surety that James is going to keep hurting him, isn't going to stop until something stops him.

Mac knows he should be doing something. He knows he should be fighting, finding leverage to get his hands free and hit back, kick James' knee out, somehow defend himself. The door is so close, not forty feet away, and all it would take was dazing James enough to get there, run out of the house, and he'd be free. But Mac's brain just _isn't working_ , and for once in his life he has no ideas. There's just pain, and fear, and the voice of a little boy in the back of his head, a confused, devastated child wailing _why are you hurting me._

"Are you even _listening to me_?" That sentence makes it through the haze.

It could be hazarded to be the most commonly asked question of their whole relationship, delivered at various levels of annoyance or ire, and right now it's positively furious. It's a roar of a demand, and Mac sees the hand that'd hit him release his wrist once more, pulling back. He closes his eyes tight shut. He doesn't want to see the next part coming.

That's the precise moment a loud bang cuts through even the volume of James' raised voice, and the front door flies open.


	11. Chapter 11

OPINION POLL: so I'm at a bit of a crossroads here. I have more to say with this fic, could probably get another three to five chapters out with some thoughts I have about the aftermath and fallout, both personally and with the Agency, but if you guys are getting tired of this fic, it's also possible to wrap it up with the next chapter. So I'm opening it up to hear from y'all: do you want to see more from me with this one, or should I call it here?

As always, thanks for your support, and I hope you enjoy the chapter. I figured we were all finally due some comfort after the last 10 chapters. (sorry for the length of the chapter, it... got away from me a bit)

(warning: deals heavily with the direct aftermath, including description of, recent past emotional/psychological/physical abuse.)

* * *

Jack will never, for the rest of his life, be able to completely escape the image he's confronted with inside James MacGyver's house.

The decision to forego knocking in favor of a well-placed shoulder to the wood of the door is one easily made. Even on the front porch, the raised voices inside the building are clearly audible. Actually, no. Raised _voice_. Singular.

Out of whatever he'd been expecting, whatever Jack thought he'd find when he got the message - just a location ping from the GPS app on Mac's phone and three little dots indicating further typing that just went away after several long seconds - and raced to the place indicated, this was… This was nothing he'd have ever seen coming. Even with Delta instincts, CIA training, Phoenix experience, it takes a long fraction of a moment for Jack to process what he sees when the door flies open, banging loudly off the interior hallway wall.

James is there, in the living room, voice booming like bottled thunder and hand a vice around Mac's wrist. He has his son pinned to the wall with one hand, Mac's own clenched fist shoved back against his chest and trapping him there. James' other hand is pulled back, about to deliver what is, judging by the blood dripped from Mac's chin down the front of his shirt, not the first blow of this altercation. Mac's eyes are squeezed tight shut and he's shaking, hard enough that Jack can see it from across the room.

That split piece of a second is all it takes for Jack to gauge what's happening and shut off every part of himself shrieking with white-hot, incomprehensible panic, and move into action. There is, at the moment, room for only one objective.

Get James off Mac. _Now_.

If there is any satisfaction to be found in the nightmare Jack has walked into, it's in the feeling of the fistful of James' shirt he snatches up to pull him in one swift yank away from Mac, and in the feeling of the man's head snapping hard to the side with the force of the right hook Jack sends square into his jaw. James is down in a second, the momentum of the pull and the punch sending him several feet away. He's obviously dazed, falling heavily to the side upon his first attempt to get up.

Jack takes a step towards him, ready to finish what he'd started with that punch, already winding up to express exactly the kind of overwhelming, all encompassing rage and grief he feels at the sight of the blood on James' knuckles. Mac's blood. This man has _Jack's kid's blood_ literally on his hands and by the time Jack is done with him, he'll-

"Jack."

There is only one thing in the world that could've stopped Jack just then, frozen him in place before he could even come within range of James, and that is it. Mac.

Mac's voice, barely audible yet slicing through the crashing rush in Jack's ears. Mac's voice, splintered and involuntary, throwing pause over what Jack was about to do, what he's so sure is the right course of action. He wavers, and Mac says it again, just his name, in that horrible tone of voice Jack will never be able to forget the sound of. It seems like such a simple thing - James hurt Jack's boy, James needs to pay. One plus one is two. Except…

The fact of the matter, bare and plain, is that what Jack has just walked in on is abuse. He's interrupted an outburst of violent abuse, wherein Mac's father had him pinned, bleeding, to a wall, clearly having hit him at least once already and just moments from doing it again. And the conclusion based upon this is that the last thing Mac probably needs right now is to see Jack, the next best thing he's had to a father for more than half a decade, engage in a violent outburst of his own.

Though he wants nothing more than to make James pay, rain down holy hellfire on the man until he understands exactly what it is he's done, there is something Jack _doesn't_ want that is stronger still, overriding anything else. And what he doesn't want is to cause, for any reason, by any means, even the slightest bit more pain to Mac. Forcible, immediate revenge, tempting though it is, won't help Mac right now. Realistically, seeing Jack give James the beat-down he thoroughly deserves would probably compound the fact that he's very obviously scared shitless and traumatized as hell. So, exercising the most restraint he has probably ever had to deploy at once in his life, Jack un-clenches his fist, takes a deep breath, and steps away from James.

Turning, he looks to Mac, and the sight leaves Jack with the breathless, gutted feeling of having just had a switchblade jammed under his ribs and twisted. Mac is still pressed back against the wall, this time of his own accord, and his entire body is rigidly still. His wrists, pulled tight to himself like he's guarding them, are mottled with red marks, evidence of just how tight James' grip had been. It promises deep bruising later, as does the similarly discolored skin on his jaw beneath where his lip has been deeply split. Mac is staring vacantly at where James lays sprawled on the floor, and he's visibly swallowing every so often. His shoulders move with shallow breaths that seem to be taking conscious effort to continue drawing in.

Given the nature of how they met and the job they continue to do together, Jack has seen Mac pretty badly off on numerous occasions. He has seen his partner bled near to death, screaming in pain so long and hard that he lost his voice for three days afterward, catatonic or panicking in the aftermath of the kinds of things that terrible people do to the kinds of people who try to stop them. He's seen Mac hurt in ways that still keep him up nights, seen him with his defenses and composure stripped in ways people who knew him in their day-to-day wouldn't believe. This time... This is near the top of the list.

Okay. Okay. There are things that need to get done _now_ that can't get done if Jack is still overwhelmed by his own emotions, by how much it hurts to see how much Mac is hurting, physically and otherwise. So he tries, to the very best of his currently limited ability, to compartmentalize - something Mac has always been better at than him. What does his training say? What is the protocol for this?

Before you can tend to or comfort the victim, you have to neutralize any continuing threat posed by the attacker.

As if punctuating the point, a groan rises from where James is still down on the floor. It peters off into the vague shape of a word, one that may have been a name, and Jack feels his anger spike back up higher than it had been before. He turns on James, hyper-aware of Mac behind him, and points one accusatory, just slightly shaking finger at him.

"You'd better keep it down, there," he says, voice a measured sound of cold, clear warning.

Turning back, he hates having to make Mac think about any of this, to problem-solve in the aftermath of what's been done to him, but the threat posed by James must be addressed before anything else. He's dazed for now, sure, but what happens when his head clears?

"Anything we can use to keep him from running off?" Jack asks Mac, trying to sound as calm and in control as possible. "Handcuffs, zip-ties, something…"

No response. Mac just keeps looking at James, where the man has given up on his second attempt at standing, hunched over his forearms braced against the floor. Jack clears his throat to get Mac's attention, and feels a sharp stab of guilt when he gets a sharp inhale in response. At least Mac is looking at him now.

"Anything we can…" Jack trails off when Mac pushes off the wall, a small, undisguisable wince playing across his face, and walks into the kitchen. He glances over his shoulder at James, says, "If you know what's good for you, you'll stay put," then follows. He doesn't have any faith in James knowing what's good for him, but he's almost definitely concussed from the punch, and as yet unable to stand, and Jack _does_ have faith in gravity.

There's a rattling sound in the kitchen, and Jack rounds the corner in time to see Mac close a drawer, a roll of duct tape held in one hand. His face is blank, eyes vacant, and it scares Jack more than if he'd found Mac collapsed against the counter sobbing, having a panic attack, breaking kitchen appliances. With the knowledge that they have to get back into the living room with some expediency, Jack can't help but do something now, make some effort to take care of the kid has so, so badly needed him for so long.

Reaching out to him, Jack goes to put a hand on Mac's shoulder, offer what small amount of comfort he can while they're still in this awful house. He's barely made contact, fingers brushing the fabric of his shirt, when Mac flinches sharply away. He curls in on himself and ducking his head away and saying so quiet Jack almost didn't hear it, "Don't."

It's the second time in the last few days that Mac has reacted like he thought Jack might be about to hit him, and nothing over the course of Jack's entire life to date has broken his heart quite like this fact does. It makes him hate James impossibly more. Hate is not a word he uses lightly, and he feels that it is completely justified. The man has hurt Mac so deeply for so long that he can't be _completely sure_ that Jack won't do the same. He's made sure that for Mac, nothing and no one is safe any more, and Jack _hates_ him for it.

When Mac looks back up, his face is finally displaying something other than emptiness. He looks embarrassed, apologetic, like he wants to say something, but can't. Jack puts as much empathy and understanding into his own expression as he can, and smiles gently.

"Okay," he says, voice conveying no blame, no sense of betrayal at Mac's frightened reaction. All Jack wants to do right now is fold Mac into his arms, hold him tight and promise it'll all be okay, protect and care for him the way he deserves to be protected and cared for, the way a father ought to do. But something else a father ought to do is prioritize the wellbeing of his brutalized child over what he _wants_ to do, and at the moment Mac doesn't seem capable of handling physical contact. "Okay, no touching just now, that's fine. That's alright."

Moving slowly and cautiously, Jack takes the roll of silver tape from Mac, then moves deliberately towards the sliding door to the backyard. "Here's what we'll do, alright? You're gonna go outside and wait for me back there. I'm gonna make sure he doesn't take off, then I'm gonna call Matty to come deal with him, and then you and I are gonna get you home. Okay?"

After a few seconds, a hesitant nod, followed by a hoarse voice, only the third word Mac has spoken this entire time.

"Okay."

It would be a lie to say leaving James duct taped to his own bannister didn't involve some degree of satisfaction. Jack leaves the man there, half-expecting shouting to follow him, the main reason he'd told Mac to wait outside. If there's anything Mac doesn't need right now, it's to hear whatever poisonous shit was likely to come out of James' mouth as his coherence returns to him. Contrary to expectation, though, James stays silent. Not a word is exchanged between them before Jack turns and exits the house.

The still quiet of the backyard grows oppressive and stifling soon after the door closes behind him. But they can't talk about what happened inside just yet, not with fresh blood still sporadically dripping from Mac's chin onto his shirt, and James visible from where they're standing. Not with the way Mac still can't look him in the eye, the shuttered, defensive posture with which he's standing there. So Jack turns on the tried and true part of his brain that produces prolific amounts of directionless babbling, and just talks. Most of it is about what they'll do next, how they'll wait here until Matty gets there, and then they'll get in Jack's car, and Jack will take him home. How it'll all be okay.

He talks himself in circles, speaking in a low rumble that sits at half his usual volume. It's how you talk to hurt animals and frightened people you share no common language with, meaning conveyed predominantly through the sound of words rather than their content. Jack wouldn't place bets on how much of what he's saying is actually making it through to Mac right now, but he hopes the sound of his voice is striking the chord it always seems to, when the kid's injured or scared or for some reason out of his right mind.

Matty's arrival is blessedly swift, and her immediate takeover of the situation at hand equally as welcome. She moves with authority and confidence, and Jack can see underneath the surface the barely contained wrath that matches his own. Before she's hardly arrived, she's got James packed away into a van with the doors shut behind him, and is standing in the living room with Jack, who doesn't know what to say.

"Matty, I- He was- When I got here, James-"

"It can wait," Matty says firmly, interrupting him. She takes Jack's wrist, squeezing tightly. "We have to talk about this, obviously, but that can wait. Everything else can wait. I've got James. Can I trust that you've got him?" Her gesture out towards the backyard takes Jack's focus back to Mac, still there. He'd been loathe to leave his young partner out there alone, but he'd had to talk to Matty, and putting Mac in the same room as James ever again was not a choice he was going to make.

"Yeah," Jack confirms around the lump in his throat, the tightness in his lungs. His agreement is fierce and certain, over the sense that he's lying, that he's already failed at the promise he's making. "I've got him."

"Take him home," Matty orders. Her hand is still warm on his wrist, an anchor point, a refute to the doubt circling Jack's mind. _Tough shit,_ that grip seems to say. _Doesn't matter if you failed before, he needs you now_. "Take care of him. Call me when you get the chance."

Jack nods, and she's gone.

"Okay, kiddo," he murmurs, walking back towards the sliding door. "It's time to go home."

The drive home is wordless and the air inside Jack's car is heavy. It's a short trip, and Mac spends the entire journey with his head against the passenger's seat window, watching the scenery. It feels like that first night again, when James drove Mac home after the first time he'd hit him, only this time his cut lip is impossible to hide. His lip is split on the outside, his wrists are throbbing, and the back of his head repeatedly reminds him of the integrity of James' living room wall. And the man driving is different this time, too.

Mac would almost rather it was James, not Jack, taking him home after an incident of violence left him too shaken and unbalanced to so much as speak. Because Jack being here means Jack knows. It's been playing on a loop ever since that door opened. _He knows. He knows. He knows._

It's not paranoia this time, not the spooked-rabbit conclusions of a hypervigilant brain. It's just a fact. Jack knows. He knows about James, about where that almost-black-eye had really come from, has surely pieced together that it's been a lot more than just those two times. Jack knows, and Mac has no idea how he's going to react.

When they get home, Bozer's car isn't there, and it's not until he notes that absence that Mac remembers he doesn't live alone, and that would've been one hell of a conversation he just isn't ready for quite yet. They enter the empty house alone, Jack allowing him space while still giving the impression of shepherding him, guiding him in and to the couch, where they both sit down.

"I've gotta ask," Jack says, in a tone indicating he really, really doesn't want to. Mac doesn't want him to either. Whatever it is, he doesn't want Jack to ask, because as soon as he does, Mac knows he's going to tell the truth. He's going to tell Jack whatever he wants to know, and probably lose complete control of himself in the process. "Do you… Do you need a hospital?"

That hadn't been what Mac was expecting, and he's startled enough by it that he almost laughs. Almost. But he sobers quickly, when he realizes Jack has no idea how badly he might be hurt, what kind of beating he may be imagined he'd missed in the build-up to the scene he'd walked in on. _It's really not that bad_ , Mac almost says. He sees the look on Jack's face, though, and thinks better of it.

"It's just what you can see," he says, his voice sounding disconnected, like it's someone else speaking and he's only listening from somewhere far away. "Maybe another- a bruise or two. I'm… I don't need a doctor." _I'm fine_ joins _not that bad_ in the pile of things Jack probably doesn't want to hear right now. Mac doesn't want to upset him any further. He doesn't want to cause any more trouble, god knows his life has just cracked down the middle and spilled an almighty mess right onto Jack's. He doesn't need to add anything more to the nightmare he's already dragged the older man right into, the nightmare he never signed up for.

Mac did. He let this happen. He signed up for this, and now Jack knows, and it's _hurting_ him to know, which means Mac let that happen to. He's the reason Jack is hurting so much he's been half afraid his partner might cry a few times over the course of the last hour and change, and Mac is not what could be called _impressed_ or _happy_ with himself over it. He can't make it worse.

"Alright. In that case, I'll, uh, I'll be right back, okay? I'll be just a minute." Jack's hand hovers for a second near Mac's shoulder, then is gone with him, headed in the direction of, presumably, the bathroom medicine cabinet.

He watches Jack go down the hall, and the instant he rounds the corner out of view, Mac's blank look crumples. He drops his head into his hands, face contorting into a silent cry, an expression of wordless agony. His shoulders heave up and down, frantic breaths he has to fight to keep soundless. Mac's face hurts, his head hurts, his arms hurt, his chest hurts, everything hurts. It all hurts, so bad, and he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what he wants.

Well, that's not true. He knows exactly what he wants. He wants Jack.

More than anything, Mac wants Jack to return, to sit down on the couch next to him and pull him into a hug, tell him it'll all be okay, that it wasn't his fault, that he didn't bring this down on himself. (That Jack still loves him, even though he's caused so much trouble, brought about the deep reservoir of pain he's seen in Jack's eyes every time the man looked at him.) It's terrible, and stupid, and unfair, that all he wants is for Jack to hold him, comfort him, when _he'd_ been the one to pull out of Jack's reach, back at the house. Jack had gone to touch him, and Mac had jerked back and said 'don't', told him not to. Jack had accepted it so easily, so kindly, that Mac had wanted to explain.

 _It's not about you_ , he'd wanted to say. _I'm not scared of_ you _I know_ you _won't hurt me, but he… The only time James ever touched me at all like you do, like I was someone he loved, was right after he hurt me. Sometimes, after he hit me, he'd rest a hand on my back, squeeze my shoulder, that kind of thing. It was the only time he was ever physically affectionate, and it's… I can't, this soon after he- It's too soon. It's too much like him. It's not about you._

But he hadn't said anything. He'd just stood there in the kitchen and shook and now Jack probably thinks he's too messed up to be touched at all, and he's done this to himself. No matter that he wants to be touched, no matter that he has no idea how to ask for it. So, in a self-pitying, heartbroken spiral, Mac allows himself, for this moronic, humiliating, _juvenile_ moment to just want. To think of the way he's never felt as safe, as much like someone's son, as he does the times Jack has held him, and _want_.

By the time Jack returns with a washcloth, Mac has schooled his face back into a mask of reserved calm. He sits, still and quiet, while Jack perches on the coffee table across from him, and offers the cloth.

"You can do it yourself if you don't… But somebody needs to clean up that face, buddy." Jack's voice is quiet and patient, and Mac just closes his eyes and tilts his head, wordless permission to go on.

The washcloth has been wetted with water that's neither cold nor hot, but pleasantly warm, and that small detail of care for not just Mac's health and safety but his comfort in this moment is enough to make his eyes sting fiercely behind closed lids. Jack cups a hand around the back of Mac's neck, gentle and just as warm, supporting his head with a strong, steady touch. The first contact of the washcloth takes Mac by surprise and he flinches, jolting back a little against the palm holding him still.

"Sorry, kid," Jack murmurs, stopping what he's doing and waiting. He says nothing else, doesn't speak a word while he waits for Mac's breathing to even out, for the hammering pulse he can surely feel in Mac's neck to calm and slow. The cloth is guided over his face with just enough pressure to get the job done, cleaning the blood away with painstaking cautiousness. When the mess made of his lip has been tidied, the hand the hand supporting his head leaves for a moment, precise fingers laying steri-strips over the deep split.

"Don't think you need stitches," Jack says, still in that quiet, quiet voice. The hand returns, thumb stroking over the hair at the nape of Mac's neck. "Should probably keep putting those on for a couple days though. So it doesn't scar too bad."

Scar. The thought of a scar hadn't even occurred to Mac, the possibility of a permanent reminder of what James had done being with him forever one that had escaped him entirely. It's a sickening, unexpectedly devastating thought, and Mac's breath catches. His shoulders jerk once, hard, and it's a miracle he makes no sound.

"Mac…" There is more heartache in that one word than Mac has heard in Jack's voice in recent memory, and it's all over.

Mac's resolve crumbles completely and he falls forward. It feels anything anchoring him has gone, and he's lost what small amount of control he'd ever had. And Jack, well. Jack catches him. Jack's arms catch him before he can fall, pulling him in and holding him close. The embrace is light, until Mac presses into it harder, wordless dismissal of the concern about aggravating any hidden injuries. The hold tightens then, granting what Mac won't or can't use words to ask for. That hand is returned to the back of his head, other arm wrapped over his back in a protective grip that makes him feel like he's wearing armor.

He's not crying. For anything else Mac can say right now, he isn't crying. He's shaking, and his breathing is erratic, feeling Jack's arm pressed to the back of his ribcage with every heaving gasp of air, but he isn't crying.

 _I'm sorry_ , he thinks, wild and frantic. _I'm sorry, Jack, I'm sorry. I'm sorry_.

It's not until Jack makes a hushing sound, squeezing him fractionally tighter and whispering 'not your fault', that Mac realizes he's speaking out loud.


	12. Chapter 12

I'm sooooo sorry for how late this is, guys! I'm in uni and had a bunch of things due in a row there, things just got nuts. Thanks to an overwhelming response, one that flatters the hell out of me, I'll be continuing this fic on through the fallout I have in mind, including a lot of Mac and his family trying to help him heal, a confrontation with James, and some more bureaucracy with the Agency. Thank you!

(Also I hope you guys are ready for a lot of like, unrepentant fluff, because that's a good portion of this chapter.)

(warning: fallout of, including references to, emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. some self-blame from mac.)

* * *

Not hurting Mac is something that has never been very high up on Jack's priorities list. This seems wholly contradictory to… just about everything, but the fact of the matter is, it didn't _have_ to be a priority. It was just a fact - hurting Mac was so out of the question there was never a need to prioritize it. Now… Now everything is shifted and tilted and Jack is ripped harshly between wanting to hold his kid as tight as possible and the question of whether hugging Mac just a shade too tightly is going to hurt him by aggravating an injury Jack doesn't know about.

Sure, Mac said it's 'just what you can see, maybe another bruise or two', and from a standpoint purely cataloguing physical injuries, it's not that bad. He's got a split lip that will likely scar, at least for some time after it heals, there's still that fading black eye, the red imprints of James' hands around Mac's wrists that still hadn't faded by the time they'd dealt with the blood on his face. If he's telling the truth, and his clothing is only hiding 'another bruise or two', then it's so far down the list of 'times Mac has been hurt, ranked by severity' that it doesn't even place.

Knowing this, though, it's not enough to erase the thousand 'what-if's that have run through Jack's mind before he'd outright asked Mac if he needed a doctor. Ever since the word 'abuse' entered Jack's mind, the questions have bombarded him - what kind of damage could Mac have concealed from them with long sleeves and careful movement? Jack had caught himself wondering if James had ever broken bone, if his partner's back was striped with ugly welts, if Mac could've kept that hidden from them. He still sees it when he blinks, those imagined wounds, and it informs the way he holds Mac now.

At least Mac has stopped apologizing. He's gone quiet, head heavy against Jack's collarbone, slumped forward and curled in on himself in Jack's arms. Protectiveness buzzes, fierce and aching, in Jack's chest as he sits there, determined not to move before Mac is ready to.

"It's okay," he murmurs, mindless and without meaning or direction, words just for the sake of saying them. His heart hurts, his lungs hurt, everything about this hurts, and it's an active struggle to not get up off this couch, march back over to James' house, and see holy hellfire rained down on the man for what he'd done. But, again, taking care of Mac needs to come before even daydreaming about revenge on his father, so Jack does his best to put James out of his mind and focus on the boy in his arms.

Jack curls his fingers through blond hair, touch light and careful over where he knows Mac's head had been knocked into the wall. He tries to convey as much comfort and safety as possible with the touch. Harsh, struggling breaths push back against the arm he has wrapped below Mac's shoulder-blades, and it makes that protective ache throb acutely.

"It's okay," Jack says again, rubbing his palm over Mac's side. "It's alright, kid, it's all gonna be okay." He knows he has no right to promise that, no guarantee he's not lying just to get Mac to calm down before he hurts himself. What he does know, though, is that he's going to do absolutely everything in his power to make it true, and for the moment at least, that's going to have to be enough.

Jack would've been perfectly fine to stay there forever, content to fabricate a reality where as long as he holds Mac in this protective embrace in this quiet, empty house, nothing can touch him. Just while they're here, in this moment, Jack can keep him safe. Just here, love is enough to keep him safe. But, much though he might be loathe to admit it, Jack knows it can't last. This house won't remain quiet and empty forever, and indeed that quiet emptiness could shatter at any moment. Because someone else lives here, and more than that, there are other people in the life Mac has constructed here in Los Angeles aside from the two of them.

Matty knows. Matty - more than ever convincing Jack that she is exactly the right person to be in charge and they are unspeakably lucky to have her as such - took the information that the insidious, overtaking mission was in fact just a cover for ongoing abuse, and moved to address the immediate problem at hand. Processing what had been done to someone Jack knows Matty well enough to know she loves had been shelved in favor of dealing with James and the threat posed by him. Without her talent for compartmentalization, the immediate necessary action pulling focus and energy, it's hard to imagine Riley and Bozer will have the same reaction.

"Mac," Jack says softly, though it sounds unnaturally loud against the backdrop of speechless, heavy air. "Mac, kid, are you with me?"

The young man now slumped against him, entire weight supported by the hold on him in a move of complete trust that honestly scares Jack a bit, stiffens again, tension returning to where it had slowly, painstakingly bled out.

"We've gotta talk about what you want to tell Riley and Bozer," Jack continues. Mac's breathing changes, stuttering into a harsher pattern. It makes Jack worry that all of the progress they've made in getting him to calm down is gone down the drain, and he stops, hand still braced over Mac's back, holding him steady. He doesn't seem like he's going to spiral into a panic attack, and so, after listening to him draw unsteady, distressed breaths, Jack goes on. He doesn't want to, but he has to. It's a problem that's going to come up, and it's better to know before how they're going to handle it.

"We've gotta tell them something," says Jack, careful to keep his voice calm and even. "They're gonna…" _See your face_. "They'll have questions, and I don't think they'll drop it."

It's with reluctant, slow movements that Mac pulls away and sits up on his own. He leans back against the couch, scrubbing his hands over his face and wincing when his palm disturbs the steri-strip closed split in his lower lip. Everything about him, from his hollowed expression, to the defeated slump of his shoulders, it screams exhaustion. He looks burnt out to the core, and Jack hurts to see it. How tiring it all must have been, not just bearing the abuse, but bearing it alone, keeping it a secret from the people who loved him.

Jack doesn't know whether James had threatened him into keeping quiet or if it was an effect of the ever powerful force of shame, embarrassment and a sense of guilt preventing Mac from telling anyone what was happening to him. Either way, that kind of secret kept for any amount of time is a massive weight to carry, and he has no idea for how long Mac has been carrying it alone.

"The truth," Mac says eventually, sounding just as worn as he looks, and it takes Jack by surprise. He doesn't know what he'd been expecting, but that isn't it. "We'll tell them the truth. I'm not… They're gonna find out anyway, and I won't lie to them about this. I can't lie."

Privately, Jack is immensely relieved by this assertion. He agrees, both with the fact that they'd have found out at some point regardless, and that it was a bad idea to lie, but he had no way of being sure that Mac would agree, would see the merits in confessing such a terrible thing to two of the people he's closest to. Knowing Mac, he'll see it as a burden he's placing on them. He'll see the pain Jack is sure they'll feel when they find out the truth, is sure because he felt it himself, and feel like it's something he's done to them, a fault of his for hurting them.

No matter, they'll deal with that when it happens. For now, Jack is just glad he doesn't have to figure out how to avoid either lying to Riley and Bozer or betraying Mac's trust and telling them a truth that isn't his to tell. He nods, giving a slight smile he hopes is comforting.

"Okay," says Jack, nodding again. "Alright. We'll tell them the truth."

Mac nods back, taking in and pushing out a shaky breath. It's a terrifying thought, telling them the truth. The rabbit hole of what might happen then, how they may react, what it may do to their relationships, is a deep and frightening one. It leaves Mac not for the first time that day afraid he might be sick at any moment. Rather than continue to run risk-reward scenarios, brain churning out possible outcome after possible outcome, he looks back at Jack. Jack, who's already looking at him, with an expression that doesn't help.

"It wasn't…" he starts, trailing off. He's not entirely sure what he's trying to say, what he's trying to refute. He just knows he wants that look gone. "It wasn't like that."

"What wasn't like what?" Jack is frowning now, which is at least something different than before, than the expression Mac has woken up to in the hospital after the worst days of career. The days he'd not been sure he'd wake up at all.

"With my dad." The word sticks in Mac's mouth, but he grits his teeth. He's better than this, than falling apart because he was hit a few times. "It wasn't like whatever you think it was like that's making your face do what it's doing. It wasn't every day or anything. It wasn't that often. Just…" _Just when he thought I needed it. Just when I'd really messed up, refused to listen or cooperate. Just when I'd earned it._ "It wasn't like you're thinking."

"Mac," Jack says in an odd tone, "I'm gonna say this as many times as you need to hear it before you believe me. _Once_ is enough, kid. _Once_ is _that often_. That it happened at all means it's exactly like I think it was."

Before he can respond, search through the jumble left after the floor's fallen out from under his thoughts, the door opens, and Mac is confronted with a completely new set of problems. The voices outside stop abruptly when Riley and Bozer notice who's already inside the house.

The moment Riley sees his face and the damage thereon, it's immediately clear to Mac that she knows exactly what's happened. Her movement arrests several feet from the couch, her eyes flicking from the bruises, to the blood dotting the front of his shirt, her face twisting slowly into a look of horrified conviction.

"What did he _do_ to you," Riley says, voice a hair louder than is normal.

It came out intoned like a statement rather than a question, and Mac's mouth is too dry to answer. In all honesty, the fact that she's put the pieces together so quickly and easily is something of a relief. Mac doesn't know how he'd have managed to say it out loud, to find the words to tell them without prompting or guidance what had been done. He knows the word 'abuse' would never have made it out of his mouth, and he'd be left with a catalogue of events and actions. He should've known that Riley of all people knew better, though, and would figure it out the moment she saw his injuries. Bozer, though, he…

Well, judging by the changing looks playing across his face, Bozer has put together who the person Riley'd been referring to when she asked Mac what 'he' did is, and what that means. Mac's throat hurts when he swallows, pushing slowly off the couch to stand and face his friends. Bozer looks sick and dismayed, Riley still bears that expression of awful certainty, and all Mac feels is guilt. Behind him, Jack's voice rumbles in the same steady voice he'd been speaking in since he showed up at James' house, the one Mac knows he has to be using on purpose, fighting hard to keep the underlying tremor out of.

"Matty took James into custody today," he tells them, and there's a buzzing in Mac's ears, like distant static.

The guilt is battering him in waves. Riley is looking from him to Jack in a slow, thoughtless pendulum swing, processing, while Bozer hasn't taken his eyes off Mac once. The night Bozer found out about the Foundation springs abruptly to mind, and Mac feels sick. He's done it again, he realizes. He's done the thing he swore to Bozer he'd never do again, and kept a massive secret from his roommate, his best friend.

"I…" Mac's voice is an arid croak, throat tight and hot. He swallows again, clears his throat, looks down. The floor is compelling as a point of focus, in comparison to looking at Bozer again, the accusatory look of 'how could you lie to me like this _again_ ' he's sure he'll find in the ever too forgiving young man's eyes. "I'm s-" With a fierce reminder to himself that it's time to buck up and face the music, the reality of where keeping this secret for so long has got him to, Mac forces himself to look up and finish what he's been incapable of saying so far. His voice wavers, but he pushes through, staring just past Bozer's face, barely not meeting his eyes. "I'm sorry I broke my promise, Boze."

"What?" Bozer's never sounded so confused, and Mac continues, though a tremor runs through his lips and his words are embarrassingly unsteady.

"I promised I wouldn't keep secrets like that from you again, and I- I broke that promise, and I'm sorry for- I'm sorry. I let you down by- I'm sorry." The temptation to make excuses is strong, but Mac fights it, keeps his head up and forward while his hands squeeze in fists at his sides, nails biting into his palms. Bozer takes a couple of steps forward, and Mac reigns himself in as tight as possible to control the instinctive flinch. He wants to apologize again, but the words won't make it out. His lungs are too constricted to speak.

"Mac, I…" With a mangled look on his face, Bozer takes another step. He's within reach now, hand twitching up fractionally towards Mac. "You don't need to _apologize_ to me for- Hey, look at me, okay? There's nothing you've gotta be sorry for. You didn't do shit to me, Mac, you did _nothing_ wrong. Nothing."

In a moment of brilliant coordination, Mac takes a step of his own and crumples just as Bozer's arms come up and open to catch him. There's something freeing about the knowledge that the truth is out there, that they know. The most important people in Mac's life, they all know, and none of them so far have shown any signs of the disgust he'd been afraid of, the disappointment from those people whose opinions matter so much he'd been sure he'd see. He's a grown man with extensive combat training who'd let someone smack him around, gone straight back over and over, and kept it all a secret.

James had never even ordered him to. There was never a moment after James slapped or shook him where he'd threatened Mac to keep the violence between them, a secret from his team. Mac had done that all on his own, and the longer he'd done it, the more responsible he was for it continuing. At least, that's what he'd been so afraid they'd think, because that's how _he_ felt, how he'd thought about his own culpability in the abuse.

Bozer's grip is tight and distraught, the hug fierce and solid in a way Mac had been worried he'd never feel again. After such a prolonged period of instability, of time where the very ground under his feet felt under question, it's a welcome relief. Just like Jack, Bozer is as sure and dependable a presence as he's ever been, holding onto Mac like he wishes he could've done something to save him, and for lack of that, hopes to give him back some of the sense of safety that James stole.

" _I'm_ sorry, hey?" whispers Bozer fiercely, against Mac's shoulder right beside his ear. " _I'm_ sorry."

It's hard to pull away, but Mac knows he eventually has to. After far longer than he can excuse to himself, Mac takes a deep breath and straightens from where he'd been bent over, supported by Bozer's shorter frame. He looks away, unable to meet his roommate's eyes, drawing his wrist over his cheeks. It comes away dry. Small mercies.

"What can we do?" The voice is Riley's where she stands next to Jack, having moved at some point while Mac was distracted. Her arms are folded tight over her torso and her mouth is pressed into a thin line, but the question is genuine and her face is determined. She's asked because she really wants the answer, wants something to do , rather than the sense that she has to ask. It makes Mac want to give a genuine answer, forces him to think about it.

"I want…" Mac shakes his head, looks around at his house, the house that feels so distant and foreign to him now. "I just want things to be normal." His voice cracks on the last word and he feels his cheeks heat up. It's a stupid thing to say, he realizes in the seconds following his saying it. What a ridiculous thing to ask for. They've just come into the house to find him with a battered face, had it confirmed it was his father's hands that dealt the damage, and he's asking them for _normal_.

It's been months since normal. Mac isn't sure he even knows what normal is anymore.

"Alright," Riley says, nodding sharply. "Well. Y'know what?" She points, indicating both Mac and Bozer. "You two owe me a movie. My last pick on movie night got interrupted with that Serbia thing, and I think the rules say I get a do-over."

"There's no rules to movie night, Riley," objects Bozer. His own attempt at contributing to the lightening of the mood is uncertain and strained, and Mac has never loved him more than in that moment, just for trying.

Riley ignores Bozer's input, motioning the boys towards the couch while she proceeds to the DVD cabinet, rifling through the collection she's pitched her own additions into in recent months. Bozer and Mac walk around to the couch at her beckoning, Mac shooting a look at Jack as he goes. The older man smiles gently, though his eyes are too bright, and Mac has to look away before he can come to the conclusion that somehow, he might've made Jack cry in all of this. He sits down next to Bozer on the couch, watching Riley dig through DVD cases almost in a daze.

Somewhere off to the side, across the room, the patio door slides shut, indicating Jack has left to either get some space or take care of something outside. Maybe both. Mac can't blame him for it, and is blessedly not left with much room to contemplate his absence by how Riley has settled back into the couch at his side. She reaches across his back to pull him over, until Mac's weight is resting against her.

She hadn't hugged him earlier like Bozer had, but there's just as much breathtaking care in the way Riley touches him now, thumb stroking over the side of his neck. Mac can feel her hair against his cheek where his head is leaned against her, and her shoulder rises and falls slowly with her breathing.

Normal is what he'd asked for, and with the movie playing in front of him, Riley and Bozer on either side of him on the couch, it's almost possible to imagine this is normal. But Riley's grip on Mac is tighter than it usually is when the two of them allow themselves to seek comfort from the presence of the sibling neither of them had growing up. The leaning itself isn't unusual, but there's a ferocity to her hold on him that goes beyond their usual (what they themselves would never describe as) cuddling. And then there's Bozer, who himself is sitting far closer than usual, his leg against Mac's in a solid line of warmth. At some point, he's reached across to take Mac's hand, their palms pressed together like he's afraid something terrible will happen if he lets go.

Things aren't normal. They're not normal, and though he feels almost okay for now, like he might someday actually be okay again, Mac knows deep in his gut that this it isn't over just yet.


	13. Chapter 13

As ever, on my favorite broken record, thank you all so much for your wonderful comments and support. I could never have made it this far through this fic if I didn't know it meant something to you guys too. Much love!

(Warnings: discussion of abuse. A LOT of guilt.)

* * *

Jack is loathe to leave the house - indeed not keen on losing sight of Mac at all for the foreseeable future - but the phone call he has to make isn't one he can make while in earshot of his younger team members. When the patio door closes behind him, the sudden quiet stillness of the day is shockingly strange. He'd almost expected it to be night, like there was no way this day could contain any more than it had already seen come to pass. But the sun still shines down like none of it has happened at all, like Jack didn't learn something terrible today.

But he did. He's found out about something horrifying, has borne witness to the image of someone he loves suffering at the hands of someone who was also supposed to love him, accompanied by a realization of retrospective sickness that it's been happening for some time now. That a day like that could contain anything else, could have also room for Jack to stand still on a patio with a mild sun shining down on him, it seems ludicrous. And this day must yet contain more, because he did come out here for a reason.

'It can wait,' Matty had said. Well, now it can't any more, because there are some things he needs to talk to her about before anything else can happen. When he goes to have the conversation he knows he has to have with Mac, he wants to be able to give him some answers. If Jack feels so thrown by this, like his world's been turned upside down, just for finding out what James had done, he can only imagine how anchorless Mac feels, being the one it's been done to. The least he can do is provide some stability, some direction.

"Matty, it's Jack," he says when she answers, as if the Director of the Phoenix Foundation doesn't have caller ID.

"Jack," she replies briskly, wasting no time on poking fun at his unnecessary introduction and taking control of the conversation immediately. Jack is grateful to her for it. He had no idea what he was going to say. "How is he? I presume, given I called medical and they haven't seen him, that Mac's injuries weren't severe."

It doesn't escape Jack's notice, what she's called him. Not his first name, which Jack has heard her say maybe once or twice over the entirety of her tenure with the Foundation. Not his more often used last name either, the one he shares with the man she's just taken into custody. No, Matty called him Mac, his nickname, an affectionate reference used by the people closest to him. She'd signalled by her choice of words that she was asking as a member of the family, as someone who cares for the kid a great deal.

"No," Jack confirms. "Physically speaking, it ain't that bad. His… His lip is gonna scar, but it'll probably fade, eventually, and it doesn't need stitches. He doesn't need a doctor; there's not much more anybody can do for him other than over the counter pain meds. He said…" Here he hesitates, a physical pain settling into his chest at having to repeat this out loud, put it out into the world for Matty to know. "He said there was some bruising from- from before. Just a bruise or two, other than the shiner he showed up with yesterday." It's happened before, goes unsaid. James has hit Mac before.

"So physically, he's gonna be fine."

"Right." Jack's voice is reluctant, which leads directly into Matty's next question.

"And how is he, really?"

The sigh Jack lets out has a hitch in the middle, a place within that long exhalation where the air catches and shudders. _How is he, really. Well, I walked in on his daddy beating him, evidently not for the first time, and with the way he's talking, or not talking, I'm gettin' pretty scared the bastard has him convinced he deserved it._

"It's not good," is what he says out loud. "He's hurt, bad. It explains everything about the way he's been acting, all the evasiveness, the fact I've barely seen him since James came back around. I think James has been isolating Mac on purpose. Isolating, gaslighting, keeping him from remembering which way was up and somehow convincing him he couldn't come to us for whatever reason, that he couldn't tell _me_ what James was doing to him."

"So you think it's been happening for a while then." Matty's voice is hard and cold, giving the impression that what she's asking for isn't fresh information or insight but rather confirmation of something she already suspects. Jack hesitates for a moment, feeling uncomfortable standing outside Mac's house theorizing about the nature and timeline of what's been happening to him, but answers the question nonetheless. He's been thinking hard since arriving at James' house, and it's something of a relief to be able to voice his thoughts out loud, to compare what he's thinking with a figure of authority.

"I can't say for sure, but I'd bet anything the abuse has been going on since just about the beginning, since we found James," Jack says, absolute certainty backing up the words. "Probably looked different at first. Could'n't've come right out the gate with stuff like I saw today. Mac would've walked right out the door if that's how it started. No, I think it didn't get physical until recently, but I'd bet it's been abusive since way before violence came into it. Not that _he'd_ see it that way, I'm sure." Jack can almost hear it now, James' annoyed voice defending himself and his early behavior, as if the only way to hurt someone was to hit them. "Probably has Mac convinced not to see it that way either."

Matty makes a wordless noise of assent, and the call lapses into quiet. Neither of them say anything for a long moment, live silence hanging between them with the rush of LA traffic in the background. Jack glances over his shoulder back in the house, where he can just barely make out the movie playing on the TV. It's not enough to tell what they're watching, but something about making that momentary, tangential connection to the three inside on the couch settles his nerves. The tightness squeezing his lungs eases by a fraction, knowing they're inside, and at least right now, they're all safe and sound.

"How are _you_ holding up?"

The question takes Jack by surprise, breaking through the quiet. He hadn't predicted that, hadn't predicted Matty, ever the pragmatist, the realist, the actionist, taking her eyes off the prize for even a moment and diverting energy and attention where it didn't belong. This isn't about him, this is about Mac. Still, he finds himself answering.

"I can't stop seeing it." It's a struggle to keep his voice steady, to not sound like he's inches from breaking down crying or running to the railing to throw up into the bushes below. He's done so well, so far in this call, trying to sound professional and detached even as the images played in his brain on an inescapable loop. Even as it feels like there's a hollowpoint in his chest cavity, leaving shredded destruction in its wake. "Every time I blink, I see it, that look on his face when I first got there. Eyes closed, bracing for the- for James to-" Jack has to stop there to compose himself, swallowing hard against the raw throb of his throat.

"I can't imagine what it was like, having to see that."

"He's my-" _My son. I met him when he was just a damn boy out in a place no kid that young had any business being in, and I've been taking care of him ever since. We may never name it out loud, never quite look it in the face, I may have no right at all to call him mine, but when I look at him, I see my son, like I look at Riley and see my daughter. And I let him down. I let him down, how the hell do you think I'm doing._

"I know," Matty says. Of course she does. Matty's always been two, seven, thirty-five steps ahead of him, in just about every way. "I know what he is, Jack, that's why I asked."

"James hurt my kid, Matty." Jack stops fighting with his voice for a moment, allows it to crack and waver. "I saw that man hurt him, and then I- I cleaned the blood off his face and held him while he shook in my arms and said he was sorry. Mac _apologized_ to me. So no, I'm not doing especially well at the moment, thanks."

There's a claustrophobic pause while Jack breathes heavily, and Matty sits in silence on the other end of the line. It's clear she has more to say, and eventually, Jack gets tired of waiting, marinating in his own guilt and grief over what's happened while another shoe might be about to drop.

"Okay, Matty, out with it. What aren't you saying?" He sounds snappier than he means to. Under the circumstances, he figures it's forgivable.

"It's the Agency," Matty responds immediately, with no roundabout skirting of the matter at hand, no avoiding the truth. "They're coming tomorrow to take custody of James, and I've been informed they'll be calling Mac in for an interview then as well."

Not at _all_ what Jack had even remotely been anticipating.

"I'm sorry they _what_?" he asks, voice deadly calm. "I know I can't have heard you right just there, because it sounds to me like you just said the Agency is planning on pulling my partner in for an _interview_ not forty-eight godforsaken hours after he was attacked by _his father,_ one of _their Deputy Directors_. And I know that is not what you meant."

"It is, actually," she refutes, and Jack's hand grips the patio railing so hard he can feel a splinter shoving its way into the skin of his palm. "They need his statement for their internal investigation."

"No," Jack says immediately. "No, Jesus no, absolutely not, no way in _hell_ , Matty, they're not getting _near_ him."

"I'm afraid we don't have that option," Matty says, voice firm and laden with distaste. Jack's chest squeezes, any tension that left him earlier returned tenfold. It only gets worse as she keeps going. "Their investigation isn't about the assault, though that is a factor." The word 'assault' causes Jack's grip to squeeze harder, splinter digging deeper into his palm. "Their investigation is about a breach of security. When James was formulating his _plan_ , he told Mac things. A lot of things, things the Agency didn't want anyone outside of their walls to hear. They need to know exactly what Mac knows and how he found out, and if we fight it, we risk getting him investigated by them for espionage. If we keep him away from them, they're going to take that as an indication that he's done something wrong, and it'll be that much worse for him."

"So they're gonna…" Jack shakes his head, restarts. "They're gonna drag him in there not a full day after that and make him answer a bunch of questions about James, and there's _nothing_ we can do to stop it?"

"Not if we want this to be as easy on him as possible," says Matty gently. "I'm sorry, I really am, but if you don't bring him in, they'll come get him, and I don't think any of us wants that."

"He didn't do anything wrong." His voice is barely a mumble. It's directionless, nothing Matty doesn't already know, obviously, but Jack feels like he has to say it anyway. "Mac's done _nothing_ wrong, and the world just keeps- his goddamn _father_ just keeps- When is it gonna stop? When is that man finally gonna stop hurting him?"

"Soon," Matty says. "We'll make sure of that. Anyway, I wanted you to know about the interview ahead of time, but we can't stop it and we can't postpone it. My recommendation is you do the best you can to prepare him for it, and be ready to do damage control after."

"I'm already _doing_ damage control," Jack mutters, resentful and heavy-hearted. "What I _should've_ done is figure this whole mess out a helluva long time ago and put a stop to it before it ever got this far."

"Hey." Matty's voice is suddenly sharp, causing Jack to jerk the phone away from his head for a moment, surprised by the ferocity of the word. "You didn't do this, Jack. _You_ didn't hurt him. Don't you dare let any of the blame for this slip off James MacGyver. He did this, not you, not any of us who didn't see what an extremely well-trained, skilled agent didn't want us to see. The blame is exactly where it belongs, on the one, single man responsible. Leave it there and let him carry it."

It's hard to argue with that one.

The call ends shortly after, and though no longer occupied by the conversation, Jack stays on the porch for a while longer. He stares down at the skin of his palm, picking at the splinter that he'd absently driven into his hand by gripping the railing so tight. Only a tiny, barely visible bead of blood is left behind, easily swept away by his own thumb. A faint throbbing reminds him it's happened, but otherwise, no evidence remains. If only the damage done to Mac was so easily cleared away.

Jack finds his thoughts drifting to a particular part of his conversation with Matty, his theory on how the toxicity of Mac and James' relationship progressed and grew until it was a monster of smoke and tar, invading Mac's mind and heart before it reached his body, painted bruises on his skin. It's with a jolting sickness that Jack wonders if Mac ever would've told him, what it would've taken for this news to break itself. If whatever accidental mis-aim or thought-erasing rage that left Mac with a visible mark hadn't taken place, and Jack hadn't subsequently prompted Matty to contact the Agency, he's sure he wouldn't know by now.

How far would it have gone before they found out? How far would James be able to convince Mac was acceptable, how far before Mac broke and confessed? Unconsciousness? Hospitalization? A step farther, the possibility Jack doesn't even want to consider?

It takes pressing his hand, the same one with the still-pulsing reminder of the splinter, hard over his mouth to keep himself from throwing up at the thought, at what it would've been like to get a call from a hospital, _Mr. Dalton, we have you here on file as the emergency contact for one Angus MacGyver, how soon can you get here?_ That was, if James hasn't somehow had the paperwork changed. If Jack would've even found out before days had passed, days of frantic searching with a terrible discovery at the end.

By the time Jack is sue he'll be able to handle whatever he's going to walk into without breaking down when the kids, when Mac in particular, needs him to be strong, the movie is over. The only person actually still in the living room is Bozer, sitting alone on the couch and staring vacantly at the far wall. Jack frowns deeper and walks over, craning his neck to get a good look at the kid's face. It's damp, Jack notes, observes shining tracks down his cheeks in the split second before Bozer notices him and drags a sleeve over his face, clearing his throat.

"Mac about fell asleep during the movie," he says, voice unmistakably hoarse and thick. "We talked him into going to bed. Taking a nap. Whatever. Riley's in there with him, we didn't want to…" His voice trails off and he shrugs, his teeth clenching and releasing a few times, the muscle of his jaw visibly tensing. "We didn't want to leave him alone, but he needs the rest. He's exhausted."

Without a word, afraid that making his presence more clearly felt would cause Bozer to startle and bolt like a deer in a clearing, like a starling taking flight, Jack sits down. As he'd hoped, Bozer keeps talking.

"He's barely been sleeping. I keep hearing him walking around at night, and he's- he woke up screaming, not that long ago. No idea what he was saying but he was scared shitless, took me forever to get him to calm down. I don't think he ever went back to sleep after that. I almost called you." Bozer's eyes flick over to Jack, then return to that distant spot on the wall. "I should've called you. I should've done a lot of things."

It would seem Jack isn't the only one struggling with guilt. Before he can say anything, repeat the words of wisdom Matty had imparted on him about where the blame belongs, Bozer goes on.

"I should've seen it. I mean, we live together. I've known him forever, since we were kids, I know him, I should've- but, like, what if I didn't? What if I never did?" The questions are seemingly chaotic, jumping around and without a clear focus, but Jack has a sneaking suspicion he knows exactly where Bozer is going with this. "What if this was- Did it happen before, too? Was James- Did I miss this for years ? He did a lot of stupid kid shit, we both did, we were all scraped up, like, _constantly_ , but what if-"

"I'm gonna stop you right there," Jack says abruptly, half because going down this road won't help anyone, half because he thinks he might lose it completely if forced to too long contemplate the mental image of a little boy with shaggy blond hair and curious blue eyes, bearing the bruises and split lip of the young man sleeping down the hall. "I don't know, is the truth, and I don't think we're ever gonna know, not unless Mac decides to tell us. I gotta say, I don't think so, but that's just a hunch. But you were a kid, Boze, you were a child and you had no reason to be lookin' for that kind of thing. If it did happen, it's not on you. None of this is on you. It's on James. Every bit of it, every terrible little thing, it's on _James_ , you hear me?"

Bozer looks at him with wide eyes, searching for something, maybe proof that what Jack's saying is right, that he truly is blameless in the awful tragedy that's befallen his best friend, their family. Finding something there that at least partially satisfies him, he nods. It's not enough.

"I need to hear you say it, c'mon now," Jack prods, and Bozer clears his throat.

"It's on James," he repeats back, voice thready and small. Jack nods approvingly.

"There we go. Now, we just gotta get that through our boy's head, huh? His skull's a little thick, but I think we can manage it."

That manages to draw the weakest, least genuinely mirthful chuckle Jack has ever heard come out of a person, but it's something. One less kid to worry about falling apart on his watch, at the very minimum.

"Right," he says. "He's asleep then?"

"Finally, yeah, I think. Riley texted me a couple minutes ago." At Jack's expression, Bozer's eyebrows knit together. "Why, do you need to talk to him? He really needs the rest, Jack, I don't wanna wake him up."

Jack does need to talk to Mac, but that can come later. It feels like there's an anvil on his chest, compressing his lungs, knowing what's coming down the pipe and being the only one that knows it. But Mac has to be told first, and the very least he can do right now is let the exhausted, traumatized kid get some much-needed rest. The next blow doesn't need to fall just yet.

"It can wait," Jack says, unable to help feeling like somewhere out there, wherever the Agency headquarters were located, a the countdown timer on a bomb has begun to tick.


	14. Chapter 14

So this chapter is both long and extremely late. Whoops on both counts? I'm not super happy with it either, but what's to be helped. Thank you thank you for continuing to read this fic, and I hope nobody thought I'd forgotten about it.

(warning: references to and aftermath of abuse)

* * *

In the end, Jack tells Bozer first. He does so mainly so that, when Bozer goes to tell Mac that Jack needs to speak to him, he'll have something to tell Riley to keep them both in his room while this conversation happens. It works, and Mac walks out into the living room alone, looking like he knows something terrible is about to happen.

Jack is expecting a bigger, more dramatic reaction from Mac when he gets the news, dismayed yelling or running out of the house and away somewhere, but that isn't what happens. Mac doesn't detonate. He disintegrates. He folds in and shrinks, and it's all Jack can do to refrain from pulling Mac into his arms, holding him tightly where that sudden, visible vulnerability and exhaustion, that pain, can't be weaponized.

"Mac, buddy," Jack starts carefully, only to be interrupted by a question that stops him short.

"What if I don't press charges?" Mac's voice is small and flat, but there's something slightly desperate in his eyes. He's hunched in over himself, shoulders curved and exhausted, and there's a sick hope in the question he repeats now, elaborates and in doing so tears the wound in Jack's chest open wider. "If I drop the charges and he's released, nobody has to interview me about anything, right? If I don't press charges, it'll- It'll end here."

Even as he says it, Jack gets the feeling that Mac knows it isn't true. His heart aches all the harder for the kid, trying to end something they both know is far from over, wouldn't be over even if they never spoke of it again. Even if they never talked about it, if it was dropped never to be mentioned again, the wounds left in Mac run far too deep. Even if his face was fully healed right now, his lip sealed and wrists untouched, unmarked, there would still be scars, deep trenches of hurt, warped and throbbing.

"They're not your charges to press or drop," Jack says, keeping his words frank and honest despite the continued gentle down-pitch of his voice. Mac has to know this now, before it's upon them, and beating around the bush will only prolong it. Never mind that Mac wouldn't appreciate the impression he was being coddled. "The Agency is primarily looking into a breach of security, an intel leak they didn't authorize. I won't lie to you, they're gonna ask about the other stuff too, about the…" About the abuse. "About what he did. But their charges are between the Agency and James, not… Not about what he did to you."

"So there's…" A tremor runs through Mac's voice, interrupting the sentence. He stops, purses his lips briefly, and tries again. "There's nothing I can do to- I have to go."

Jack nods. Mac takes in and lets out a deep breath, shoulders hitching hard up and down. On the exhale, he tilts forward, head falling heavily into his hands. His shoulders hitch again, and Jack reaches out to comfort him, but before he can make contact, Mac has stood abruptly. He rounds the couch and Jack is alarmed for a moment that he may just be about to leave. He doesn't. Instead, he turns when he reaches the end of the couch, pacing back along its length. One of his hands goes to cover his mouth, but comes away quickly, shaking, when the move obviously causes him pain.

There's nothing Jack would like more than to stop there, to allow Mac space to process and come to terms with what has to happen, but he can't. There's still more that needs to come out in order for Mac to have a clear, full picture of the upcoming events. Jack stands as well, walking around the couch to lean against the wall near where Mac is pacing, frenetic energy rolling off him in uneasy waves.

Jack stands there, still while Mac paces, and explains in a soft, steady voice exactly what has to happen and why, that it has to be tomorrow, that they'll look like they have something to hide if they postpone. Everything Matty said to convince him, Jack repeats now, because he knows she's right, and hoping Mac will see it too.

It doesn't take long to figure out there's very clearly something Mac wants to say that he isn't saying, that he's choking down silent every time he looks at Jack and then quickly away. He's done it several times, more as the explanation has wound down, until Jack can't take it any more and asks.

"What is it, Mac, what's on your mind?" _Probably a thousand things, who knows how much of which he's able to talk about, genius_ , Jack thinks acidly, though he keeps his face encouraging and non-judgemental as he waits for a response.

For a moment, it even looks like Mac might answer. He doesn't, though, gaze now fixed firmly on the far wall. Hazarding a guess, given the subject matter of their conversation, Jack takes a risk and makes an offer.

"I can go with you, if you want. For the interview. You don't have to go alone."

This draws his attention, snaps blue eyes over to him for long enough to see something flicker through them, before Mac looks away again, this time to the floor. His mouth is pressed into a thin line, which has to be hurting his split lip, though he doesn't betray so if it is.

"Mac, do you want me to come with you?" Repeating it works the way Jack had hoped it would, and this time Mac says something.

"Yeah, but- Jack, I can't keep doing this," is what he says, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, or any sense at all really, but it's something, and Jack can work with something.

"Doing what?" he asks. His eyes narrow, and dread creeps into his mind, curling around the edges of his thoughts. "What'd he say to you, Mac? What'd he tell you you were doing?"

"That I-" Mac won't look at him again, and that's the worst part of all of it. The avoidance, like he's scared of what he'll see if he meets Jack's eyes. "This is stupid."

"I promise you it's not," Jack counters, as calmly as he can manage. "Tell you what, why don't you just find whatever it was he said to you that's got you thinking I can't come with you for that interview when you want me to, and just say it back to me. Don't bother with context or anything, just give me what he said and we'll go from there."

Mac's head drifts from side to side, and his cheeks burn with shame when he mutters the answer, too quiet under his breath for Jack to make it out at all.

"I can't hear you, kid, you're gonna have to speak up just a little."

"He said, 'What is he that he's gonna deal with it forever?' He asked how long I thought you were going to put up with me being so reliant on you when we weren't even family, called it 'needy and unbecoming'. That's what he said." It's barely louder, but it's audible this time, and hearing that hits worse than any of the handful of times Jack has been shot.

"Well that's just…" In order to control the tremor that runs through the words, Jack stops talking, looking away and gathering his composure before he goes on. "That's just nine kinds of absolute horse-shit. That man clearly doesn't know the first thing about me if he thinks for a second I'd ever get tired of taking care of you, that being here for whatever you need me for is some kind of chore. You're my partner, Mac, and more than that, you're my boy. Daltons don't turn their backs on family, and that's exactly what we are. You and me and Bozer and Riley and Matty. We're _family_ and of course you rely on family. That's what you're _supposed_ to do."

They're words Jack doesn't say out loud often, for the embarrassment he knows they cause Mac, the way he never knows what to do with his hands when words like 'family' and 'love' are placed in them, but he needs to say them now. 'What is he that he's gonna deal with it forever?' Jack wishes he'd been there when _those_ words were said, had the opportunity to tell James to his face, _he's my kid, you son of a bitch, more mine than he's ever been yours, that's what the hell I am._ He'll settle for making sure that Mac understands that, though.

"Mac?" Jack says after a while of no response, of Mac staring resolutely at the floor while his whole body shakes with the rigidity with which he holds himself. "You understand me, don't you? You get what I'm saying?"

Mac nods wordlessly, then moves faster than Jack can process, knocking into Jack's chest with a force that would've sent him backwards if it weren't for the wall behind him. The arms around his waist are wound tight enough to hurt, not that he cares one bit about it. Mac is trying to talk, but all that's coming out is small gasps of air, the faint shape of words, and eventually he gives up, pressing his face to the front of Jack's shirt and holding on. Jack takes a moment to respond, to close his own arms around the overwhelmed boy and return the hug.

"I know," Jack says, without specifying what it is he knows. They both understand, and he doesn't think he could get it into words if he tried. "I know, kid." He lifts a hand from Mac's shoulder to smooth it over his hair, touch light and mindful of the surely still aching spot where his head had been bounced off the wall of his father's living room. "I've got you."

It's not too long before Mac pulls away, hands rubbing furiously at cheeks that Jack can see aren't damp. There are no tears, not on his face or left on his palms, and Mac seems as confused by this as Jack does, observing it.

"I need…" Mac clears his throat and shakes his head. "I need a minute." His steps, when he walks away, are impressively steady. Jack can't tell if his hands are shaking, balled into fists and shoved into jean pockets, but he can see the marks beginning to darken in bracelets around them, and that's enough.

It's hard, but Jack manages to give it a few minutes before following. He allows Mac the space he clearly needs, but won't take a risk on giving him enough that it starts to feel like abandonment, getting up eventually and walking out back as well. Mac is sitting on a porch chair, hands knotted tightly together, elbows braced on his thighs. He's staring out through the slats of the railing at the city, the distant smoke-haze that hung over all of Southern California, the place Jack used to think he knew almost as well as Texas. That is, until they found out who was there, who'd been somewhere in that city all along.

It's that man himself that Mac speaks of, when his voice breaks the heavy quiet of the back porch.

"He's there. At the Foundation. He's gonna be there when we go in for the interview tomorrow, isn't he?"

When Jack turns to the side, Mac is looking at him, gaze turned from the city to his partner. He frowns and tries to sound neutral when he says, "Not in the room, no, but he's at HQ in holding."

"Am I… Am I going to see him?"

"Do you need to?" The question seems to bring Mac up short. He blinks, confusion blatant when he answers with another question of his own.

"You'd let me do that? See him, talk to him?"

 _Hell no. Hell absolutely fucking no, not on your life, son_. The thought occurs to Jack immediately and forcefully, but he bites his tongue, keeps all words in his head. He can't speak until he can figure out how to do so without hurting Mac. Mac who is looking at him, waiting for an answer, and terrified of what that answer will be.

There are two scenarios Jack can imagine Mac is likely afraid of right now, judging by the emotions playing faintly across his face. Wary hope switches almost indistinguishably out with resigned betrayal. On the one hand, the question of if Jack is going to be like James, take his autonomy away, leave him backed into a corner and controlled, even if it's out of a sincere desire to keep him safe. On the other hand, the equally if not more terrible question of if Jack might be just fine with Mac being in the same room as his abuser, barely a day after physically pulling the man off him. Jack is left with the knowledge that neither is true, but knowing he has to go about his response carefully or Mac, in his current state, is liable to mistakenly conclude the worst.

"It's not about me letting you," Jack says, voice gentle and as calm as possible.

Explaining this sort of thing, having to teach Mac, slowly and carefully, piece by piece over the span of years, what it's like to be cared for without ulterior motive, it hurts. It hurts even more now that there's been such a severe setback, since James took a wrecking ball to the leaps and bounds of progress Jack had thought they were making, landing him explaining this so many times over today.

"The choice is yours. If you need to see him, if you've got something you have to say to him that'll help you find closure, then I'm sure not gonna stop you." Jack pauses when Mac looks away, patiently waiting for him to look back before continuing. He needs Mac's full attention for this part. "If that's what you need, I'll walk you over and wait outside until you're done. I'll go in with you if you want. I won't like it, I'm not gonna lie, the idea of him having even the slightest _opportunity_ to hurt you again makes me sick, but it's not a question of 'let' you, Mac. It's not up to me, and it shouldn't be."

Mac is looking at him with an odd expression, one Jack is fairly used to seeing in circumstances like this one, times when he or Bozer or Riley try to explain to him 'this is what family is, this is what love is supposed to look like'. There's amazement and bemusement, somehow combined into the sense that what Jack is saying is both revelatory and too good to be true, a rosy presentation of something that can never actually be quite as kind and compassionate as Jack is making it sound.

The look seems to say 'there's no way this won't come back on me, no matter what I decide'. He's braced for the choice to be taken away from him, for the reactions he'll see if he tries to make it anyway, condemnation if he tries to go see James, condemnation if he decides not to go see James. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, all the while Jack tries to tell him he's damned neither way, absolving him of a nonexistent crime before he's even committed it.

"Whatever you decide," Jack insists, driving the point home, "I'll be here. You go, I'll be here. You don't go, I'll be here. Like I told you inside, kid, whatever you need, I'm here. I'm on your side no matter what, there's not a choice here you could make that'd see me mad at you, that'd see me walk away."

Mac tries to speak but can't quite get the words out. He gets up and walks over to the railing, leaning forward against it, and when he looks back at Jack his eyes are bright and glassy. They flicker back over to the city and he tries to speak again, but his voice cracks on the first syllable of whatever word he'd been about to say. A frustrated whine escapes Mac's throat and he shakes his head roughly. It's clear he's upset with himself, likely for being upset, and Jack can't bear to just stand there and do nothing. So he gets up and crosses the space separating them with a few short steps. He makes no direct reference to Mac's uneven breathing, doesn't push him to speak before he's ready to, just lifts an arm and holds it out. Mac tilts to the side, leaning over to close the last few inches separating them.

It's there, with Jack's arm heavy and solid around his shoulders, without the burden of looking him in the eye or worrying what his face looks like, that Mac makes his decision.

"I don't want to see him," he says, in a voice barely above a whisper.

"Okay," Jack murmurs over his head. He's unspeakably relieved, though he certainly isn't about to tell Mac that. Something anxious and afraid has eased the hold its claws have in his gut. "That's okay, kid. You don't have to. You don't ever have to see him again."

Mac nods, the movement knocking his chin into Jack's shoulder, and he tightens his grip on the boy a fraction in response. It's not a full-on embrace, not how Jack had held him earlier, twice over, after cleaning up his face and again when Mac had asked him to stay for the interview. It's a hug that won't quite admit to being one, Mac turned in and leaning against Jack without letting himself cling the way he had before.

It's as if he thinks there's some quota he's filled, a limit to the number of times he's allowed to need to be held, even under these circumstances. Of course, that's absolute bullshit, if you ask Jack, but he understands, so he doesn't make an issue of it. He's pushed Mac enough today, walked him through enough difficult things. This one he'll let sit for the moment.

He stands there braced against the porch rail, arm wrapped around Mac's shoulders and holding him in the half-hug Mac thinks is all he's allowed to ask for. His young partner is leaning against him hard enough that Jack is pretty sure if he were to move abruptly, Mac would fall. Jack doesn't talk, for once, just stands on Mac's porch, running a hand up and down the kid's upper arm, and thanking Riley and Bozer in the back of his mind for the privacy they've given this whole series of conversations.

Tomorrow, things are going to get hard again. Jack knows this. But he also knows that he's not going anywhere, and the rest of the team isn't going anywhere either. None of it is fair, none of it is just, and Jack hates the Agency more than he thinks he's hated anything in a long time, but that's a reality they'll face tomorrow.

Tonight, he'll comfort his kid as well as he can, and they'll all reach for whatever normal they're able to find.

Tomorrow comes too quickly. Jack doesn't go home, and neither does Riley. He leaves Mac to get ready alone to speak to the other two for a moment. His advice to them is to head to Riley's find something to do for the day, something to focus on that isn't James and the Agency and bruises. They seem reluctant, but willing to take his advice, and he's glad that this at least won't be a fight today.

When he and Mac leave for the Foundation, they take Mac's car. Mac doesn't ask to drive outright, but it's enough that he's sending Jack's car anxious looks every couple of seconds. It's enough that Jack knows for a fact James never let Mac drive anywhere, always picked him up and left him without a way to get home on his own. So he directs them towards Mac's car without a word about it and pretends he doesn't see the raw gratefulness in the kid's face when he notices where they're headed.

The drive is silent for a few minutes, until Mac breaks it. He speaks quietly, in a subdued voice nothing like the way he usually talks, though the words aren't shaking. It's impressive, given their content, the man they're in reference to.

"My dad's gonna be there somewhere. At the Foundation." Mac doesn't look at Jack, doesn't let his eyes flicker off the road for a moment.

"Yeah," Jack says, the same as he'd responded the night before when Mac had asked the same question.

"And you're gonna go talk to him, before the Agency takes custody." That time it isn't a question. Mac isn't asking if Jack is planning to have words with James - he already knows. Jack confirms it anyway.

"Yes, I am." He keeps an eye on the kid when he says it. Something flickers across Mac's face at the affirmation. Something anxious and scared. "I'm not gonna start nothing with him," he reassures, looking to the window and silently adding _though I'd sure as shit like to_. "He just needs to be told in very clear terms that no way in hell is he ever coming near anyone in this family again. As long as that's what you want, of course."

When he adds that last part, he glances over again in time to catch the tiny, embarrassed smile that flickers across Mac's face when he nods.

"Yeah," Mac says quietly. "That's what I want."

That combined with their conversation at the house, the relative catharsis reached and the fact that Mac had actually admitted he wanted Jack there with him for the interview, it had Jack feeling not really good, or relaxed, about what they're about to walk into, but certainly less core-deep worried about just how badly this was going to go. Mac seemed to have found his way to some kind of solid ground. He's driving with steady hands and clear eyes, and Jack is worried, but not as worried as he could be.

He should've known there was yet another shoe left to drop.


	15. Chapter 15

is it a good idea to post another chapter so quickly after the previous one? no? do i possess the self control not to? also no? well. here we are then.

(warning: discussion of abuse, cruel treatment of an abuse victim by interviewers)

* * *

"No," Jack says, voice flint and iron and this close to sparking fire. "No, Matty, _no_. I'm going in with him. I'm not gonna leave him, you can't keep me out of there."

Of course, Matty knew this was going to happen. The instant she broke the latest piece of bad news, she knew Jack would react like this. Somehow, the implication still rankles, and she can't help the snap that breaks into her voice when she responds.

"Now _what_ in the years we have known each other leads you to believe I would for _any_ reason want to prevent you from staying with him for this interview? If it were up to me, this wouldn't be happening at all, and since it has to, god knows I want you there with him. Of _course_ I want you with him." Matty waits for the point to sink in. She sees the moment it does, the moment understanding flickers across Jack's angry, defensive face. A split second later, it just gets angrier.

"But it's not up to you," he says. " _They_ won't let me in."

"The Agency is insisting on speaking to Mac and Mac alone, citing security and privacy policy concerns," explains Matty. She hates repeating what the Agency told her, perpetuating their bullshit, but she has to say something. Give them something. "They don't want anything discussed making it out of that room. They don't care that you're his partner, that doesn't matter to them. For the Agency, security is top priority, and always will be, no matter what."

"They can't do that to him." Jack's voice is half dismay, half defensive fury. "We can't let them do that to him."

"We don't have a _choice_ , Jack."

If Mac feels any kind of way about being discussed as if he weren't in the room, he doesn't betray it on his face. His eyes are unfocused and his expression blank, shoulders rising and falling with shallow, far too even breaths. It's enough to have Matty scared for him, for how deep the damage all of this cruelty and unfairness has wrought.

"Mac," she says, trying to get his attention. At first, he doesn't even blink, only turning to look at her when she repeats his name, a hair louder and a fraction sharper. A barely perceptible, full-body shudder later and he's looking at her. Mac doesn't look scared, or upset, or angry, none of the things visibly warring with one another in Jack. He just looks exhausted and resigned, like he can't even bring himself to be surprised anymore.

Matty's voice gentles when she speaks to him again. The last thing she wants to do is speak to this boy she's grown to love dearly with any amount of unkindness. There's been far too much of that aimed at him lately.

"Mac, do you understand what we're saying?"

"Yeah," Mac says, and his voice is flat and hollow. "I'm going in alone."

"Not alone," Matty refutes firmly, drawing odd looks from both Mac and Jack. She glances over at Jack again. "You don't have the authority to make them let you stay. But me? They don't have the authority to make me _leave_." Her focus returns to Mac, and she hopes he's hearing what she's saying as surely as she means it. "You won't be alone in there. Not for a second. Not on my watch. Okay?"

Something in Matty's voice must indicate she's expecting an actual answer, because Mac nods once, shaky and shallow. His throat works visibly as he tries to gather the wherewithal to speak. When he does, it only comes out sounding half as wrecked as Matty figures he has the right to sound.

"Okay."

"We have to go now," Matty says, inclining her head towards the door. The clock on the wall weighs heavily on her awareness, backed by the knowledge of the time in the voicemail the Agency Director left her. Jack makes his presence known once more, stepping forward back into the conversation. He's looking at Matty but his hand is outstretched towards Mac, a move to both halt any attempt to leave just yet and to indicate an intention.

"Give us just a second," he says to her, and she nods without protest.

It doesn't escape her for a moment exactly how hard this is going to be not only for Mac, but for Jack as well. She can't imagine the kind of effort it's going to take for him to remain outside while she and Mac walk into that room, not when she knows how he feels about his role in keeping Mac safe, physically and otherwise. He can have a second. She can give him that.

Jack turns towards Mac then, settling slow moving, telegraphed hands at either side of Mac's jaw, holding his head steady and looking him straight in the eye. Matty can't help catalogue the damage visible on that face, the shadowed eye socket, the discolored cheek, the steri-strips holding his lower lip together. It makes him look stupid young, and it makes her feel indescribably angry. She knew James MacGyver. She'd _known_ him, never heard him speak of a son once, not until she joined the Foundation, and now this. God, this.

Why people like James MacGyver and Elwood Davis had children at all was beyond her.

"The only reason," Jack is saying when she manages to make out the low timbre of his voice, "that I am allowing this to happen, that Matty is allowing this to happen, the interview, _any_ of it, is to protect you. We don't give a shit about their breach of security or their protocols, or anything. This is to protect _you_. The only thing we're in this for is you, and we're going to see you through it. Things might get tough in there, but try and remember that. We're on your side, not theirs. Yours. Okay?"

"Okay," Mac says, and he sounds like he means it. He's nodding, and for the first time in this whole mess, Matty feels with absolute certainty that he's going to be alright.

For all his father had done, there was still a parent standing in front of him, holding his bruised face in gentle hands, still a family waiting on him at home. Something of a parent in her, as well, Matty will admit to no one but the interior of her own thoughts. And she'll do her job where Jack can't do his, that's for sure. Mac isn't walking in there alone.

It's not far away from her office, the room she's arranged for the Agency personnel to meet them at. The walk is short, and Matty doesn't do anything to stop Jack from accompanying them on it. He walks next to Mac with a hand on the kid's shoulder, and Matty can see it settling him. She can see how, when they stop outside their destination and that hand leaves, Mac looks like he's lost something. Maybe like he's just lost.

"Go on in," she says quietly, opening the door for him. "Have a seat, I'll be in in a moment."

With Mac sent in front of her into the room she's picked for the interview - an empty office with a desk and some chairs, a wide window allowing natural light, as far from the austere interrogation rooms in the basement as possible - Matty pauses in the hall, motioning for Jack to stop with her. There's something she has to say to him before they part ways for the moment, and she can't say it with Mac in earshot.

"I know you," she says, and moves on immediately in order to stop whatever response he'd been about to make, whatever question he's about to ask. "And that means I know where you're about to go. Who you're going to speak to."

Jack doesn't provide even a weak refute, brazenly meeting her eyes and keeping his expression just as stonily determined as it was since the moment she knew he'd made the choice. It seems to say 'And? Try to stop me.'

"I'm not going to tell you not to go," Matty says, which seems to bring him up short, mouth snapping shut before anything can make it out. Even further, she digs in a pocket for a moment, producing a piece of paper and handing it to him. "This is where he's being held. Talk to him, say what you need to say, but Jack, I'm warning you, _watch_ yourself. That boy in there? He needs you, he will _need_ you after what's about to happen, and you are _no_ good to him if you get yourself arrested."

"I know," Jack says, nodding. No jokes, no kidding around, just accepting the paper and agreeing to be careful. "Thank you. Watch his back in there, will you?"

"I will."

A few more words are exchanged between them, and then she turns and steps into the room behind Mac. Jack has taken it all about as well as Matty predicted he would. She can still see his face as the door shut between them, the deep, exhausted sadness and sick worry he'd worn so clearly the instant Mac couldn't see him any longer. She hopes he'll take her advice, the words she muttered to him before leaving him out there in the hall alone while she escorted Mac into the lion's den. This interview was liable to take some time, and she'd advised Jack get out for a bit, go do something outside of the Foundation, she'd call him when it was over to go home with Mac.

Speaking of…

"What do we do now?" Mac sounds odd in a way that makes Matty nervous, wooden and unexpressive. He's sitting in one of the chairs on the side of the table farthest from the door, the wall with the windows off to the side. The most defensible position in the room. His posture is ramrod straight and his eyes are as distant as his voice.

"Now," Matty sighs, eyeing the door, "we wait." They don't have to wait long.

Though she has spoken to Director Nora Nolan on a few unfortunate, frustrating occasions, and one or two of her handful of deputies on even rarer occasions, she has never met anyone from the Agency face to face. Until now. There's almost a palpable anxiety radiating from Mac as the door opens, and Matty takes one casual step to the side. It's just enough to put her between him and the opening door. She doesn't know if it helps, and to check would involve turning around, so she merely hopes it will mean something, and focuses on the two Agency personnel that walk in.

A man enters first, followed by a woman. They are of the same approximate height, though the woman wears short heels, and neither of them are particularly either formally or casually dressed. His hair is dark and cropped close to his head, while hers sits in a cloud of red curls, corralled with a clip at the nape of her neck. They wear identical bland expressions, and there's nothing readable in their eyes.

God, Matty hates dealing with the Agency.

"I'm Deputy Director Tanner Hill," the man says, setting a notebook, folder, and pen down on the desk and regarding Matty and Mac with a cool look. "This is Agent Grace Soloman."

The woman gives a brief, tight smile to acknowledge the introduction. She sets an odd black case, smaller and more cubic than a computer case, down and takes a seat on the far side of the desk. Hill sits beside her, though no smile touches his lips, pressed into a thin line.

His attention has settled on Matty, not focusing on Mac after that first, brief once-over.

"Director Webber," he says to her, voice chilled by several degrees, reflecting glacial pale blue eyes. "I believe we stressed the necessity of speaking to Mr. MacGyver alone."

"Agent MacGyver," Matty responds, her voice matching his his when she sees the way Hill's assertion has caused Mac's posture to shrink further, "is an employee of the Phoenix Foundation, of which I am the Director, and he has been the victim of a violent attack from one of _your_ colleagues. I am not leaving this room, and Director Nolan herself can take it up with me personally if she has a problem with that."

Hill looks annoyed, but doesn't push the issue. He merely gestures at the seat beside Mac.

"I prefer to stand," Matty says, and stays put at Mac's shoulder. It's a defensive stance unmistakable as such, and there's no way Hill and Soloman don't notice. They say nothing, however, all focus turning to the reason for this meeting.

Hill sets a recorder on the table, turning it on with an audible snap.

"For Agency review purposes, this is Deputy Director Tanner Hill speaking, conducting the Code 2 violation investigation into Deputy Director James MacGyver and his actions regarding the encryption disk operation."

"This is Agent Grace Soloman, assisting," the woman adds when Hill pauses, and then they're both looking expectantly at Matty. She gets the gist after a moment and decides that she's never been in a situation where 'pick your battles' is more applicable than this one.

"This is Director Matilda Webber with the Phoenix Foundation." Her voice is chilly and she knows it, makes no effort to moderate her obvious distaste for this whole situation. When Mac looks at her questioningly, obviously taking his cues from her rather than from Hill or Soloman, Matty nods, a nonverbal 'go ahead'.

"Agent Angus MacGyver, also with the Phoenix Foundation."

Hill doesn't waste a moment, jumping right into his questions with, "What is the nature of your relationship with Deputy Director MacGyver?"

Matty superficially understands why he's asking this sort of question. She gets that the obvious, frustratingly simple or pointless questions are often the ones that end up having the greatest impact on an investigation. But right now, she isn't approaching this like an investigator. She's approaching this like family, like the last line of defense between Mac and further harm. She doesn't trust these people with him, not for a moment, and certainly not to treat him with any degree of compassion or sensitivity towards what was done to him.

"He's my father," Mac says, in answer to Hill's question.

"And when did Deputy Director MacGyver begin to inform you of matters pertaining to the Agency?"

Minutes tick past as Hill asks question after question about mundane details, the who, the when, often repeating the same question several times with different phrasing. For the most part, Soloman stays quiet, watching Mac's face when he answers with detached interest. The questions drag on, met with tired, flat answers from Mac. Matty stands at his shoulder and listens, exercising every ounce of self-control she possesses to keep quiet and not kick these people out of her Foundation and away from her family, _now_.

"Why did you involve yourself with the operation?"

"I didn't. My father involved me, he told me it was a way for us to spend time together."

"Did you speak of the operation to anyone aside from Deputy Director MacGyver?"

"Not specifically. I told my team I was working on a project, but I didn't tell them anything else."

"Did you and Deputy Director MacGyver discuss specifics anywhere outside of his home?"

"No. He mentioned it over the phone a few times, or in the car, but never anything specific. Just general."

"Mr. MacGyver," Hill starts again and Matty has had enough of that particular aspect of this interview.

It's supposedly completely focused on the intel leak at the Agency, one professional operative interviewing another about a potential breach of security, and that is no way to address a professional providing important information about an active investigation.

"Agent," Matty snaps, drawing a raised-eyebrow look from Hill, who doesn't seem pleased at her interruption. "You will address him as _Agent_ MacGyver. Remember that we are _allowing_ this interview to happen, and we can retract that at any moment. You will treat my Agent with respect or you will leave my offices, and that is non-negotiable."

Hill regards her inscrutably for a moment, before returning his attention to Mac.

"Alright, Agent MacGyver," he says, "did you ever remove or attempt to remove any materials or evidence from the Deputy Director's home?"

Mac hesitates for a moment, and Matty reaches subtly out, hand touching the arm closest to her. She can feel a slight tremor run through him, but it's gone as soon as it began, and he's still again. He's still, and his voice dead and empty when he answers.

"I took a picture of some of the plans, once, so that I could work on a really tricky part at home."

Hill frowns slightly. "And what did Deputy Director MacGyver do when he saw you take this picture?"

"He took my phone, deleted it, and then slapped me."

"Did he say why he hit you? Was physical violence a frequent occurrence?"

"He told me that the information about the operation couldn't leave the house, and that I should know better. Yes. It wasn't every day, but it was frequent." The words don't waver or falter, just monotonously leave his mouth in a sedentary, heavy line.

Matty leaves her hand on his arm as he describes the abusive incident. White-hot anger sears through her chest, and it's all she can do to stay put, to not march over to where James is being held and visiting his actions back upon him tenfold. It's probably a good thing, she thinks absently, that Jack isn't here. It's the first and only time she thinks this over the duration of the interview.

"And why," Hill drones, "if the Deputy Director had taken to hitting you, did you persist in your involvement with him and the operation?"

"Absolutely not," Matty interrupts. They're not doing this, no way in hell is she letting them do this. "That is not relevant. You ask your questions about your operation, but you said yourself, this is not an investigation into your man's treatment of his son. If you're not pursuing charges on abuse, you don't ask personal questions. Stick to your focus, Deputy Director Hill."

"As you wish, ma'am. We'll stick to the case." With barely a flicker of a glance at her, Hill continues. "Now, on the eighth of..."

The questions get more specific and lengthy from there. There isn't a clock in the room, and Matty resists the urge to take out her phone and check, but she knows they drag on for upwards of two hours, Hill interrogating Mac about details she can't possibly imagine he'd know about, including at times photographs of people, blueprints of buildings. It drags on, and on, until she wonders if they even have reason to think he knows any of this at all, or if they're just so embarrassed that this has even happened that tormenting Mac and making him feel like he's done something wrong is the only way to save face.

The worst part is the photographs. The case Soloman brought with her contained, as it turns out, a camera with which to document the injuries Mac was left with after the outburst of violence from James the day before. In the hours since the damage was inflicted, the skin of Mac's wrists and face has blossomed into a pattern of dark, ugly marks. She sees the bruises on his arms clearly now that the sleeves of his shirt, which had been pulled down low, are rolled up, intentionally exposing them.

Soloman directs him without much emotion to hold out his arms, first with his palms up and then facing down, snapping pictures of both angles, documenting the shape of large, strong hands, fingers imprinted over the bones of his wrists like they'd been dipped in ink first. Mac flinches hard when the camera shutter clicks, jerking backwards in an involuntary contraction of conditioned muscles.

"Please try to hold still," Soloman says, her voice softened just slightly. She holds the camera in patient hands, waiting for Mac to re-extend his arms out for her to see. Standing a few feet behind her left shoulder, Hill looks markedly less patient. "I need clear photos."

Mac looks vacantly at the far wall while Soloman moves to get a better angle to photograph the bruises on his face from. He manages to not flinch this time, but Matty can see his hands clenching into fists so tight she's worried his nails might be cutting into his palms, squeezing hard and abrupt when the shutter clicks and the flash goes off, illuminating the light black eye.

Soloman walks around to the other side then, asking him to tilt his head. He does so, and she takes a picture of the split lip and surrounding extent of the wound. The camera clicks again, the bulb flashes again, and Matty wants to rip that camera out of Grace Soloman's hands and pitch it off the first bridge she can find.

"If you have any further injuries, I need you to show them to me so I can document them for the file," Soloman says to Mac. She hesitates, then continues with, "If you'd like, we can step somewhere more private."

"It's fine," he replies, in a tone that leads Matty to believe absolutely none of this is fine. He pulls the hem of his shirt up, revealing a bruise that had been hidden beneath the fabric. There's a long, thin stripe of discolored skin over his right hip, and the height and location leads Matty to conclude he'd been shoved into something, a table or a counter, pretty hard if it had left that kind of mark.

"Is there anything else?" Soloman asks when she's finished with that one.

Mac wordlessly lets his shirt fall back in place, only to pull down the collar, awkwardly exposing the back of one shoulder, the older, almost faded bruising there.

"Do you need me to," Soloman begins to offer, shifting the camera to one hand and holding the other out to illustrate what she's offering, only to be cut off by Matty before she can even finish her sentence.

"Do _not_ touch him," she says, voice fierce and sharp. Soloman, startled look, but the relief in the way Mac glances over at her is enough to have Matty absolutely convinced she's made the right call in intervening. "He can handle it himself." There's no way she's going to let either Soloman or Hill grab Mac by the back of his shirt, hell, put a finger on him for any reason. There's been enough damage wrought against Mac's body by Agency hands.

When she's apparently finished her task, the woman silently backs away, camera lowering. Mac shudders when she steps out of his space, taking a quick step back himself. The veneer of being completely disaffected has gone from him, the extent of how unnerved he is shining through, making it evident that more than anything, Soloman photographing his injuries had shaken him. She wants to move closer, to touch Mac, do something to comfort him like Jack would, but she's not sure it's a good idea with him still ripped raw, strangers still here.

So focused is Matty on Mac that she hadn't even noticed Hill stepped out until the door opens and he walks back in.

"The interview is over," he says brusquely, taking Matty aback.

"Excuse me?" she asks, confused.

"New information has come to light, and we no longer need to speak to Agent MacGyver at this time." Hill's eyes flick over to Mac, who looks as confused as Matty feels. "You're absolutely sure you didn't discuss specifics with Deputy Director MacGyver at any point outside of his home?"

Mac nods his confirmation, and Hill nods back, satisfied.

"Our investigators at the scene of his home have discovered surveillance footage the Deputy Director was keeping. Guess it's a good thing my colleague has always been on the paranoid end. At any rate, before we move on with any kind of interview, we need to review the footage to see how far back it goes, and how much was actually caught on tape. In the meantime, I'll be leaving. Grace, you'll stay behind and take care of wrapping things up here?"

The question directed towards his colleague is met with agreement from Soloman, and Hill walks back towards the door. He pauses for a moment, barely touching the handle, and looks over his shoulder.

"Agent MacGyver," Hill acknowledges, dipping his chin first at Mac, and then turning to Matty. "Ma'am."

The door closes behind him before she can even begin to process this latest piece of information. She turns to the young man she's been so focused on, the one who's surely even more thrown off balance than she is by this revelation, completely ignoring Grace Soloman, who is also still there.

"Mac," Matty starts, but by the time she's finished that one syllable, Mac is out the door.


	16. Chapter 16

Here it is then, Jack finally getting to say some things to James. I hope y'all enjoy it, let me know what you think!

(warning: discussion of emotional/psychological/physical abuse, victim blaming and justification of abuse, brief description of injuries)

* * *

There's one of the security guards Jack is more familiar with, watching the door of the room Matty directed him to when he approaches. Her hand twitches towards her radio, and there's a slight crease that appears in her forehead. Jack is smart enough - and savvy enough when it comes to reading people - to know what this means, what she's evaluating him for, what kind of threat she's decided he poses. He walks right up to the door itself, the woman's hand settling solidly on the body of her radio as he does.

"I need to be allowed in there," he says, voice granting no room for negotiation.

"Dalton…" she hesitates anyway. He gets it, he really does, but he doesn't have time for this.

"You know who that is?" Jack asks, and she nods. "And you know why he's here?"

"Not exactly, but I can guess." Her voice is grim, and Jack knows they walked past her in the lobby, the day Mac showed up with that black eye. It's not hard to put together, now that she's been instructed to guard Mac's father in a holding cell.

"Right. Then you know why I need a word with him." He holds up a hand to forestall what she's about to say, the objection he's sure she's going to lodge. "I just want to talk. Trust me, I know what's at stake if I give the guy the beatdown everybody seems to think I'm gonna. I won't. I just have some things I need to say to him. I won't walk outta there leaving him with one more mark than he had when I walked in, but I've gotta go in there. Okay?"

The security guard gives in maybe easier than Jack would deem wise, were he approaching the scenario as an uninvolved, objective observer. She doesn't seem to be too deeply invested in absolutely guaranteeing James' safety. She's done her due diligence and won't go a step further, and that makes Jack inclined to believe she's guessed if not exactly what happened, then at least pretty close to it.

"You can't keep me here," is the first thing James says when Jack walks into the interrogation room. He's sitting back in his chair with an arrogant arch to his chin, the chain of the handcuffs securing him to the table pulled just taut enough to visually display his annoyance with their presence. Not hard enough to hurt, though, Jack observes. Not that James had held the same concern for his son's wrists. The ghostly imprint of his hands around them had been visible in dark bloom on Mac's skin as he turned the steering wheel in the car that morning.

This thought doesn't help Jack's words come out civil, though civility is not a priority he holds in high regard when it comes to James. Not any more. It had been, in the beginning, but the right to that courtesy disappeared the first time James raised his hand against Mac, used his words to cut Mac down, to manipulate or intimidate him.

"The hell we can't," he snaps, coming to a standstill across the table. He finds he doesn't have it in him to take a seat, to sit in a chair across from the man responsible for the insecurity he's seen in Mac since the day they met, responsible for the acute pain the kid's in now. James is a smart man, he couldn't have missed the weight Mac carried around with him. He'd seen the damage, and then re-broke Mac's heart again along the fault lines, and Jack can't sit across from him like he's an equal. So instead he stands, arms folded, and studies James.

Normally, he would find some amount of satisfaction in the bruise on the man's jaw, the evidence of the right hook Jack had delivered yesterday. Normally, though, he wouldn't have the memory of how that punch had been delivered in the process of interrupting the man while he'd been hurting Jack's partner, wouldn't have the mental image of a bruise inked in the same place on Mac's face, superimposed over James' whenever Jack blinks. Satisfaction is not something he is going to find in this room today, but that isn't what he came for.

While he did come here for a reason, though, Jack will be the first to admit he's an imperfect person, and he can't resist making some things very, very clear to James first.

"The only, and I mean _only_ reason you're still in one piece right now is that it would make him feel worse if things went down the way I want them to." He fixes James with the coldest stare he can manage, allowing the deep reservoirs of glacial hatred he feels to show, steady and even on his face, matching the tone of his voice. "And, not that you'd know anything about this, what will help _him_ is all that I care about here. Otherwise, you're a dead man."

"You can't- You can't talk to me like that," James sputters indignantly.

"You abused someone I love, I'll talk to you however I damn well please."

The use of that word, the ugly name of the ugly thing that festered in hiding for the last several months, it causes James' face to twist, his mouth curling up into a sneer and his eyes narrowing.

"Oh _come_ _on_ it wasn't- You of all people know what he's like. Kid's impossible to control. Give him an inch of rope and he'll take a mile and then hang himself with it. He needs course correction and to be taught discipline. You can't honestly tell me he follows orders with you any better than he did with me. You know exactly what I'm talking about, Dalton. You _know_ how he is."

The positioning of the two of them as having anything in common, especially when it came to Mac, along with the justification of what James had done leads Jack to the conclusion that he'd been wrong. It is absolutely possible for him to get angrier.

"You can't possibly actually believe that," he says, voice quiet and hard.

"What, he some kind of angel when you're around?" James asks sardonically, and Jack is shaking his head before the question is hardly over.

"No. He isn't. Do you think he's listened to me a day in his life, done one thing I told him to when he thought he knew better? No. Hell no, of _course not_ , but I'm sure as shit not about to start _beating on him_ for it." Just saying the words leaves an acid taste in Jack's throat. His hands burn at even the act of refuting that he would ever look at Mac, at the strong-willed convictions and selfless acts of reckless bravery that were so central to who he is, and decide he needed to be hurt until he learned obedience.

Jack knows how it feels to hit Mac. He knows, and he will regret that caustic first meeting in the sandbox for the rest of his life, though he hadn't known the kid from Adam at the time. Now, with time and blood and family between them, the idea of striking Mac out of anger or a desire to punish him, it's enough to have Jack gritting his teeth against sharp, sick nausea.

"Don't be dramatic, Dalton, I never beat him," James scoffs, and Jack feels like his lungs have frozen solid. "So I smacked him a couple of times, knocked a bit of sense into him, big deal. I was trying to keep him in line. It was for his own good. Besides, Angus is an adult. He didn't need to stand there and take it. If I'd _really_ been hurting him, he'd have fought back, it's not as if he isn't trained well enough. I didn't hit him anywhere hard enough or often enough for it to be abuse, that's just dramatic."

"If you had never hit him _once_ , what you did to him would still be abuse," Jack fires back at him. He can hear his own heartbeat in his ears, and it's decades of experience with various high-stress high-danger jobs that keeps him calm and continuing to speak coherently. His anger is sitting cold and hard in a line across his shoulders, ice and iron and very, very still. "The shit you put in his head, the way you made him feel? The way you made him see himself? You didn't have to hit him to hurt him, though you certainly didn't let that stop you."

"I didn't do anything I didn't have a right to do," James mutters.

"You _terrorized_ him."

"I took a strict hand with him, when you've been too damn soft to do so. You're clearly a pushover when it comes to him, the way he acts like he can get away with doing whatever he wants, _talking to me_ however he wants. Hell, maybe if _you'd_ been a little harder on him, _I_ wouldn't've had so much work to do." James pauses, shakes his head, then speaks again. His voice lowers and he speaks more slowly. "I had no idea he was going to be so sensitive about it. If I'd known it'd affect him like this, I would've done things a little differently."

It looks like James is about to continue, mouth halfway open and shoulders rising with words about to form, an infuriating kind of genuine regret on his face but Jack cuts him off before he can say a single one. This has gone far enough. He's heard enough. He's ready to get out of here and never see James MacGyver's arrogant face and empty eyes again. And Jack certainly doesn't think he can stand to listen to James explain that if he'd known it would _affect him_ , he'd have gone about trying to change Mac into a different person without hitting him. To listen to him continue to blame Mac for his completely understandable, completely human reaction to this kind of trauma.

"I didn't come here to listen to you defend yourself to me or anyone else," he says. "What you did is inexcusable, and you're gonna spend a hell of a long time paying for it. I came here to tell you that on the off chance you ever get out from under whatever it is your people decide to pin you with, you do not go anywhere _near_ Mac."

"If I choose to contact my son, that's nobody's business but-"

"You don't get to call him that any more. You lost the right to call him yours when he gave you a second chance and you took it and used it to hurt him again." If you asked Jack, James lost the right a long time before that, but that's a different argument than the one they've been having.

"Whose is he then?" James' eyebrows raise mockingly. " _Yours_?" Jack's face remains unchanged, and James rolls his eyes. "Whatever. You know what, take him. He's yours. You want to waste your time pseudo-parenting someone else's second-hand son, you be my fucking guest, Dalton."

The restraint it takes not to rise to the bait, to give James the fight he wants, is enormous. There are a thousand things Jack could say, a thousand refutations or defenses he could offer, but it isn't worth it. James isn't worth it. So instead, he focuses on the message he came here to deliver in the first place.

"If you get out, you don't call him, you don't text him, you don't send a _carrier_ _pigeon_. I don't want you so much as in the same _state_ , and if I find out you've tried to contact him..."

"You'll what? Kill me?" James' voice is raising in volume now, clearly moving from the blase annoyance of before to burgeoning panic and amplifying anger.

Jack laughs, and the sound is ice cold.

"I won't have to," he says. "Matty Webber will get to you first."

The door shuts behind him before James has the chance to respond.

After leaving the room where James was being held, Jack keeps walking. He walks past the woman from security, still guarding the door, down the hall, and out of the building. Once he's started walking, he just doesn't stop. He ends up in a taxi eventually, catching one far enough from the building that regulations on how close one can catch a ride with a taxi or ride-share service on Foundation grounds no longer apply. Jack doesn't plan on going where he ends up, but once he's there, it's hardly a surprise.

"Bastard said it wasn't abuse," Jack says, voice low and hollow, sitting across from his father's headstone. "That… _man_ put his hands on Mac, split his lip and blacked his eye, grabbed him and shook him so hard he's got bruises for bracelets, and that's not even touching what he's done psychologically. On top of it, he's got Mac convinced he can't _talk to me_ about any of it because he's scared I'm not gonna want him anymore. And James had the damn nerve to tell me to my face what he did wasn't abuse."

Jack's head drifts side to side, eyes wandering out over the cemetery. It's a calm, peaceful day, with only a few mourners or visitors scattered around the peaceful, solemn plots of stone. Nobody is within earshot, but Jack finds himself speaking quietly anyway.

"I can't get it out of my head," he tells the carved shape of his late parent's name. "I dreamed about it last night, y'know? That's… He's my boy, pop. He's my kid, and and I don't know how to stop seeing it every time I blink, seeing _my kid_ bleeding in that man's hands. I wonder how I let it get that far. How I didn't see it. How I let this happen."

With a soft, humorless huff of a chuckle, Jack knots his fingers through the grass at his side, pulling at it gently. His chest feels tight and his face hot. The hand not pulling the grass rises to press against his sternum, feeling the hitching of his own breath as he tries not to collapse into sobs here at the cemetery. The weight of what's happened, of what was done to Mac, what he witnessed… Jack feels like his heart's been shredded chamber from chamber, left in pieces to desperately try to continue to function amidst the impossible to comprehend.

"I know what you'd say. I know he hid it real well, nothing I could'a done about something I didn't know about. But… Can't help thinking I _should've_ known, y'know, dad? It's my job to know, to keep him safe, even if he thinks he can't come to me and tell me he's in danger. Hard to look at him like that and not feel like I'm responsible. He stopped…" Jack's voice splinters and he swallows hard, gaining control of his voice before he continues. "When James came back, he stopped laughing. I should've known."

Moments of silence slip by, a sense of quiet stillness settling over Jack in a way that's eluded him recently, since James appeared and Mac's laughter went away.

"You'd have loved him, pop," Jack tells his father after a time, a small smile gracing his face. The light breeze chills the damp lines down his cheeks, and he scrapes his wrist over his face, clearing the tear tracks. He can't afford to fall apart. Not when his boy still needs him. "You'd have loved him almost as much as I do."

The relative peace that visiting his father always brings Jack is shattered the instant he walks back into the Foundation and sees Matty's face.

"What," he says, stopping dead in his tracks. "Where is he? What happened?"

"They have what James did to Mac on video," she says without preamble or deflection. "James kept surveillance, and the Agency has it now. I don't know how much or how far back, but Deputy Director Hill interrogated him like he was a suspect and then ended the interview when he was told about the video."

"Where is he? Mac, where is Mac?" Jack wastes no time asking unnecessary questions, just peers around Matty's shoulder, stepping to the side and raking his eyes around the room looking for his partner. Video. There's _video_.

"He left. I've been caught on the phone with the director of the Agency talking about this video - which you will notbe watching, by the way, because seeing any of that will devastate you and it certainly won't help Mac - and he's gone. Home, according to Riley, she texted when he got there." It's a thorough brief of a deceptively simple situation, and Jack is nodding by the time Matty's finished talking.

The video they can talk about later. Right now, he has to go.

"I'm gonna… I have to…"

"Go," Matty tells him, opening the conference room door and ushering him out. "Take care of him. It was brutal, and he needs you. I'll call you when I know anything more."

Jack nods distractedly, waving a hand at her as he goes. He's barely been in the building two minutes and he's already leaving, pushing back out the door he's just walked through without a word to anyone aside from Matty. He's gotta get to Mac's house, as fast as possible. A problem arises with this almost immediately, however - when Mac left, he took the car Jack arrived in with him. This leaves Jack standing outside the Foundation looking around in a daze, cycling rapidly through his options to get home as quickly as possible.

"Jack Dalton," a voice says, drawing his attention to a woman standing several feet away. She looks vaguely familiar, and he squints, trying to place her. Before he can, she introduces herself. "Agent Grace Soloman."

"I have nothing to say to you," he snaps, turning away. He knows that name, why she came here. What she was a part of.

"I just came to offer you a lift home," she tells him, the sound of her low heels indicating she's walking closer. "I know you drove in with Agent MacGyver today and you've gotta get back without him now. I've finished my business here and it won't be a problem."

"If you think I'm gonna tell you where he lives, you've got another think coming, lady," Jack says, still not looking at her.

"Agent Dalton," Soloman says with a patient, placid look on her face, voice completely neutral, "with all due respect - and for what it's worth, I really believe you're due quite a bit of it - if _you_ think we don't already know where Angus MacGyver lives, you're awfully naive."

She's got a fair point, but Jack doesn't feel like listening to fair points right now. He's got somewhere he has to be, _yesterday_. He's maybe five feet farther down the sidewalk when he hears Soloman's voice sound again.

"I've never liked Deputy Director MacGyver," she says, stopping him in his tracks. Jack turns to look at her, frowning. Her face is completely open, no hint she's hiding anything. It's the most human he's ever seen her look, and it's enough to get him to pause, to wait for her to continue. "Frankly, the man is an arrogant narcissist who hates being wrong almost as much as he hates other people being right. I don't care much for Deputy Director Hill either. When I was recruited to the Agency, I believed I was serving the greater good. Now… Now I'm not so sure."

 _Too little too late_ , Jack thinks.

"What happened to your partner is…" Soloman shakes her head, eyes flicking away for a moment and then back to him. "It's terrible, and there's no excuse for it. And what we just did to him, Deputy Director Hill and I? That wasn't much better."

"Then why the hell'd you do it?" Jack is unable to keep from asking, anger flashing in his chest again.

"I can't give you any answer to that question that's gonna make you feel any better," she says honestly, "or that you'll likely understand. But what I can do is give you a ride home. If you think you can stomach the thought of sitting in a car with me for fifteen minutes, please let me at least do that much."

Jack gets in the car. Against his better judgement, spending time around this Agency operative weighed against getting to Mac as fast as possible comes to a decision that has him in the passenger's seat of the most stereotypical unmarked black SUV he's ever seen in his life.

"Thank you," Soloman says when she pulls up outside of Mac and Bozer's house. She sounds like she means it, like she really is grateful for the chance to do something, anything to make up for what she and Hill and her entire organization have done.

It isn't enough. Not enough for Jack to forgive her, and not enough for him to not be angry at her for not only her role in what happened to Mac that day but also for the way she's talking about it now. Like she knew it was wrong, but only cared enough to apologize afterwards, not enough to stop it from happening.

Jack is wordless as he gets out of the car, shutting the door behind him. Soloman pulls away from the curb and away down the street, and Jack pays her no mind. He's got more important things to worry about, waiting for him inside that house.


	17. Chapter 17

WOW did this chapter ever not want to be written. Nevertheless, I think we've all been waiting for Mac to finally have his good old-fashioned breakdown, and, well, here it is. Thanks as always for your lovely comments, and for sticking with me this far. Probably one more chapter to go from here!

(warning: self-worth issues, mac spends a really upsetting portion of this chapter trying to convince jack he deserves to be hurt.)

* * *

When Mac slams in the front door of the house, it isn't empty. The door bounces off the far wall with a hollow thud he barely hears through the roaring in his head.

 _There's a video._ It rattles around his head like a pinball game set to deafening volume. _There's a video. There's a video_. It's the last straw, and Mac can feel himself unravelling. _There's a video_.

"You're back!"

The greeting cuts through the klaxon scream of _there's a video_ and Mac's head snaps to the side. Riley is standing in the hall, surprised to see him.

"Bozer's at the store," she says. "We didn't expect you back so soon." There's a split second where she stands there, staring at him, surely taking in the absolute mess he's sure he looks right now. "Mac, holy shit, your face."

Not the reaction he'd been expecting, and as if prompted by her exclamation, Mac suddenly finds that his lower lip has begun to pulse with re-awakened pain. He lifts a hand he can't even bring himself to care is shaking and touches the pads of two fingers to his lip. They come away tinged with red, just a dab of blood smeared over his skin. At some point during his blur of a drive home, Mac must have bit his lip hard enough to open the split back up, disturbing the carefully placed steri-strips.

A long moment passes while Mac and Riley stand there at opposite ends of the hall, Mac's bloodied fingers a red flag reminder of the elephant in the room. She lurches into motion before he does, and Mac doesn't manage to reign in the slight flinch when she takes the first, abrupt step towards him. Luckily enough, Riley doesn't comment on it, just walks over to him and places her hands, slow enough to give him time to move away, on either side of his face. Her palms bracket his jaw as she turns his head, looking at the harm done.

"Okay," she mutters, clearly to herself. Mac feels his breath moving rapid and shallow, heartbeat skittering through his chest like a startled colt. Riley releases his face and nods absently, eyes flicking around the room. "Okay, just- Come sit down."

Without question or protest, Mac follows her around the couch, sitting down when she guides him with a slight pressure to one shoulder. He tries to speak, but she shakes her head.

"We're not gonna talk, okay? Just for right now, anyway, we're just gonna… We're gonna sit here, and I'm gonna fix up your face, and you don't have to say anything. Deal?"

Mac nods silently. His lip throbs with the movement, as if Riley pointing out the way he's re-opened the wound has reminded his nerves to function. It's a repetition of an exchange Mac has already lived through, sitting on the couch while he listens to someone walk through the house in search of first aid supplies, trying to stamp down the emotional turmoil boiling inside him before it overtakes him completely. This time, though, it's Riley not Jack, and she knows much more about what's happened than Jack had at the time.

True to her word, Riley doesn't try and make him talk. She doesn't leave them to sit in heavy silence either, instead talking about nothing in particular in a rambling, steady way that reminds him of Jack. She talks about some esoteric movie Bozer made her watch a week ago, what they'd come up with for dinner plans, the rotating parade of ugly floor mats decorating the hall outside of an apartment two doors down from hers. While she talks, she repeats the actions Jack took the day before.

Riley's hands are much smaller than Jack's, but the cautious care with which she touches him is the same. She pulls the damaged steri-strips off carefully, moving with a slow efficiency that avoids pulling at the split in his lip as much as possible. Talking the whole time she does it, Mac is able to focus on something other than the tugging of adhesive and the pain that follows, no matter how careful she is. By the time she lapses into quiet, the cut has been closed again, Riley drawing her hands back to lay in her lap, eyes studying him with a kind of knowing sadness that makes Mac look away.

Before he can muster anything to say, force any words out of his constricted throat, he hears Riley's phone buzz faintly. He stares resolutely at the wall as she picks it up, tapping a few words, then asking him a question.

"It's Matty," she says, "and she wants to know if I've seen you. Can I…"

"Go ahead," Mac manages, barely more than a whisper. She finishes her text and then the phone is back face down on the coffee table, and the oppressive silence has returned. After a while, another question comes, this one accompanied by more hesitation than the first had been.

"Mac, where's Jack? I figured he went with you for… For the interview."

 _Jack. Oh, damn it, Jack_. Mac groans, shaking his head and feeling his cheeks burn fiercely. "I don't know," he admits. "He wasn't there, and then I had to get out of there, and I-" His voice cracks and he snaps his mouth shut, jarring his split lip again.

"He wasn't there?" Riley sounds completely lost. "What do you mean he wasn't there? You left together."

When he tries to answer, he stops immediately, shaking his head. The words won't come out without breaking, the memory of that awful interview flooding back and choking him. Matty's resolute presence had kept him above water during the ordeal but he can't shake Hill's cold eyes, the faint spark of pity in Soloman, the way he'd terribly wished, the entire time, for Jack to walk in the door. He'd wished fiercely, with a truly unfair, irrational sense of abandonment, that Jack would suddenly be there.

It wasn't that Matty wasn't reliable, that her powerful, defensive presence hadn't kept him from bolting out of that room a dozen times over, or that he'd blamed his partner at all for circumstances so clearly out of any of their control, but… But _god_ , he'd wanted Jack there. So badly, he'd just _wanted Jack._

"For the interview," Riley concludes. Her voice is soft and just unsure enough to suggest an educated guest. "Jack wasn't there for the interview."

Wordlessly, Mac nods.

"So you were alone?"

This time, he shakes his head, and Riley revises her guess.

"Matty was there."

Another nod. It's a system that's working out, her asking and he indicating yes or no. The information gets where it needs to go, and he doesn't have to volunteer anything, or indeed corral his uncooperative voice at all.

"And then you left. Is Jack still there?"

Mac shrugs, looking away towards the door. He doesn't know where Jack is, had just left his partner behind when he'd bolted out of the Foundation without a thought as to how Jack was supposed to get home. It was selfish and stupid and irrational, and Mac acidly thinks that he's seeing a pattern emerging in his behavior today, especially where Jack is concerned. _Selfish, stupid, irrational._

"Can you tell me what happened?" Her voice has gone impossibly more gentle, and Mac can tell she's scared. It causes him to look over at her, see the apprehensive fear in her eyes. He doesn't know what Riley thinks happened, but he has to say something to make that sick look leave her face.

"Surveillance," Mac says, proud of how the word comes out in one piece. "He kept surveillance. There's video, of- There's video. Proof. My dad's going away and it's… It's over."

Riley's mouth moves in a silent _ohh_ and her touch is cool and light over the back of his hand. Granting permission to the question the hesitant contact asks, Mac turns his hand over, allowing Riley to lace their fingers together, pressing her palm against his.

"The Agency is going to take custody, and it'll be over, he's just going to be…" Raising off the couch cushion, Mac's free hand wavers a few inches through the air, a jittering, aimless gesture. "Gone. Again."

"Right," murmurs Riley, watching him with something unreadable in her face as she continues to sit there holding his hand. She opens her mouth a few times, seeming to think better of what she was going to say and closing it again before any words make it out.

Eventually, she looks away, discomfort creasing her face and her mouth thinning into a conflicted line. Mac has no idea what Riley could be about to say that'd have her looking like that. As soon as she speaks, the reasoning behind her sudden recalcitrance becomes clear.

"When my dad left again," she starts, slow and a little halting, and Mac's hand tightens on hers.

"You don't have to," he says, the rest of the sentence unfinished but clear. _You don't have to drag that up on my account. You don't have to do something that hurts because you think it'll help me._

"Shh," Riley hushes without heat, squeezing back. "I'm not finished. When my dad left again, I didn't know how I'd let myself get in that place again. Let him wreck my family again."

The urge to apologize, to say again how unfair all that was, how wrong of Elwood to just fade away from her _again_ , bubbles up in Mac, about to make its way out when she continues. Her voice picks up in both volume and strength, persistent and serious.

"But he didn't, because when he was gone, you guys weren't. You pulled me out of it, out of where I could've ended up when he left again. Elwood leaving didn't wreck my family, because I still had my family. You, and Jack, and Bozer, and Matty. _Our_ family."

Mac isn't quite sure what his expression does just then, but it's enough that hers changes in response, moving away from the lingering pain and disquiet of talking about her own father into a different kind of heartache.

"Mac." His name sounds bruised in Riley's voice. "We're your family. You know that, right? You have to know that."

 _I thought I did_. Mac's throat works around what feels like stone lodged behind his adams apple, the metastasized reminder of his father's words, repeating over and over again that he had no family outside of James, that the two of them were it and like it or not they were all each other would ever have. He hadn't wanted to believe it, but James had a way of sounding so sure, so persuasive, and wasn't that what Mac had always secretly thought himself? That he was playing at a family he didn't have a part in, putting roles on people who didn't ask for them?

"I…" he tries, but can't keep going. He shakes his head, clears his throat to no avail.

"What did he say to you?"

"Riley-"

"What did he tell you that has you thinking we're not your family, Mac? It's alright, you can tell me. If you can tell anyone, you can tell me." It's as insistent as it is gently said, the kindest blow ever dealt to the fragile parts of himself that he keeps shuttered away as deep as he can. It feels like those parts have been torn up and out and left in the open through months of James methodically stripping everything he'd used to hide them.

And so he tells her. Mac dips his head down, excruciatingly ashamed to explain it out loud, and repeats the words back to her, _you only get one family in this life_. It feels so stupid to say, with the memory of Jack saying _Daltons don't turn their back on family, and that's exactly what we are_ backing it up. He should know better. He _knows_ better. But he just can't seem to shake James. He says as much to Riley as well, covering his face with his free hand and clinging to hers with the other.

"Jack's told me," he says, voice partially muffled by the palm obscuring his mouth from view. "He's _told_ me we're family, and you have, and Bozer has, but I… My dad just…"

"I don't care how many times we've told you, I'll still say it again. He was wrong." There's nothing Mac can think of he wouldn't do to make Riley stop sounding so sad. "That wasn't your only shot. You can still have a family, you still _do_ have a family, one that loves you."

Mac nods, still covering his face. He can feel his eyes burning and his breath hitching. Something in his chest feels like it's trying to claw its way out, and it's to the point that Mac wishes he would just break down, just cry already, because then at least it would be over and he'd be able to breathe again. But it doesn't happen, and he just sits there, shaking and breathing too fast, while Riley keeps a tight hold of his hand and continues talking, repeating _we're your family and we're still here._

"I know that," Mac says, an edge of misery in the groaned words. He tilts to the side and drapes his arm over the back of the couch, burying his face in the crook of his elbow, the equation of which would be more humiliating leaving hiding his face just slightly preferable to Riley seeing it right then. "I should _know_ that, why can't I just-"

"It's okay." Riley squeezes his fingers in hers again, other hand coming up to swipe gently at his hair. It's a simple gesture of excruciating tenderness that makes Mac's breath catch in his throat. "It's okay, I get it. I do. That's why I'm telling you. He was lying to you because it made it easier to isolate you, Mac. As long as you have Bozer and me you've got a brother and a sister, you've got Matty who'd rip this city apart to keep you safe, and I know for an absolute fact that as far as dads go, you've still got one of those too."

The musculature of Mac's thoracic cavity seizes, lungs constricting even further. Relentlessly, Riley keeps going.

"He loves you. Jack loves you to death, and I think you know that, but what I don't think you know is that it's okay to _let_ him."

Mac gives a minute shake of his head, face scraping over the fabric of his shirtsleeve. The sleeves are pulled down low, deliberately hiding the bruising the Agency had so cruelly exposed and photographed just that day. Hiding his bruised wrists, hiding his face, hiding how he feels about what Riley is saying… He's hiding everything, right now.

"It's okay to let Jack be your dad," Riley says, the last straw. "I learned that one the hard way, so take it from me. He loves you and it's okay to accept it."

It's with a shameful certainty that Mac knows there have been times where he's called Jack 'dad', times when fever or blood loss left him incapable of differentiating between a feeling of being protected and cared for and the reason he never named that feeling out loud. He's always conducted himself as if he didn't remember after, lost in a haze of illness or injury, but he knows he's done it, and he knows Jack's heard. But that was before this, before James got so deep in his head that Mac's thoughts didn't feel like his own any more, before Mac let something sick and dark had infect everything, even his relationship with Jack.

"I can't." She doesn't know. Riley has no idea what kind of thoughts Mac has had, the unforgivable way he has, in recent weeks, looked at Jack, the man who's treated him like a much-loved son for years, and shied away from the shadow of James' abuse, expecting harsh words and raised hands where he _knows_ he'll find only concern and kindness.

"Why?"

Rather than try and answer, to explain to her how James managed to make him _afraid_ of _Jack_ , Mac instead pulls his hand out of her grip and balls it tight against his thigh. The strain makes his damaged wrist ache and he savagely thinks to himself _good, you deserve it_. He deserves to hurt for expecting Jack to hurt him. Because it hadn't just been that once on the plane, wondering how Jack had stopped himself from teaching Mac a harsh lesson years ago. It's every other time Mac has done or said something stupid, or selfish, or short-sighted in front of Jack in recent weeks and then immediately braced to be slapped or shouted at.

It seems like good luck when a sound at the door stops Riley from pushing further, asking anything more about why he feels he can't just accept that Jack loves him, until it becomes clear who, exactly, it is that's just arrived.

Riley is the one who opens the door when Jack knocks. She looks worried and upset, and that immediately sets his nerves on edge, even further than they already have been.

"How is he?" Jack asks quietly, and Riley shakes her head.

"You have to talk to him," she says, and doesn't elaborate. "Just… talk to him. Get through to him. Something is really, _really_ wrong and I think you have to be the one to fix it."

With that, she's gone, past him out into the front yard. Where it is she's headed isn't clear, and just at the moment, Jack is gonna have to let it go without asking. Focused on the situation demanding immediate attention with significantly more force, Jack steps inside, door closing softly behind him. Mac is slumped over on the couch, face buried in one arm and his hands scrunched into tight fists. His posture is completely rigid, with the impression of spun glass - stiff and unmoving but so fragile he might shatter if touched.

"Mac?" Jack calls his name in a low, gentle voice, rounding the couch to stand near the end, frowning and trying to squash the nervous butterflies beating an unhelpful pattern in his lungs. "Kid, can you look at me a sec?"

He doesn't move, but his voice rises from where his face is hidden in the flannel of his shirt, a muffled, "You should go."

"Why should I go?" asks Jack cautiously. He leans against the arm of the couch and tries to be patient, to pull what's going on out piece by piece, as slowly as Mac needs to go. "Do you want me to go, do you want to be alone?"

"No, but you _should_. You should just stop being so nice to me, Jack, I don't… You should just _go_ , just leave."

"Why should I stop being nice to you?" More than maybe anything else, this is what's got Jack scared, not for the situation, but for Mac himself, for what kind of lasting damage might've been going on underneath even the obvious suffering James had inflicted. "Why would I ever do that, buddy, _why_ would I leave you when you're obviously upset?"

Abruptly, Mac's head jerks up and he looks right at Jack, eyes wide and reddened. His voice cracks when he says, loud and unsteady, "Because I've been waiting for you to snap and beat the hell out of me!"

So much for slowly. Whatever Jack had been expecting, that wasn't anywhere close to being on the list. Just what the hell Mac and Riley had been talking about before he got there, Jack doesn't know, and he doesn't have time to backtrack and find out. He sits there, leaning against the couch, completely bowled over, and says the only thing he can think of to say.

"Now why on _earth_ would you say something like that?"

"See?" Mac sounds indescribably distraught, getting up and walking several feet, facing away from Jack. "You wouldn't. I _know_ you wouldn't, but you should know, before you keep just- just being nice to me, _taking care of me_ , the kind of _awful_ shit I've been thinking."

"Mac-" The name does nothing to slow Mac down, and he keeps going, pacing like he had the day before, words pouring out of him that feel like branding irons on Jack's heart, dug deeper with every incomprehensible syllable.

"I know you! I know you, I trust you, and he- I keep _catching myself_ thinking it, 'why hasn't he hit me yet?' You've done _everything_ for me, and this is how I- I let him make me _scared_ of you, let him make me think you were going to _hurt_ _me_ , how can you even stand to look at me?"

"It's okay," Jack tries, ignoring the physical pain flaring in his ribcage at hearing his boy describe expecting to be struck by him. He understands how Mac could've gotten to the point of expecting Jack to hurt him - Jack's been acting like a father, admittedly or not, for years, and Mac's actual father has just hurt him terribly over a span of months, it's not a hard conclusion to reach. What he's trying to focus on is how upset with himself Mac seems to be for having thought it. He's plainly wracked with guilt and anger, shredding himself over what he seems to think is some kind of unforgivable thing he's done, rather than a perfectly understandable reaction to being abused.

"It's not okay!" Mac is practically yelling now, and Jack stands up, alarmed by how quickly things seem to be devolving. The kid's hands are visibly shaking, now, his voice wavering as he continues, "I mean, maybe you _should_ hit me, I deserve it, don't I?"

 _He believes that_ , Jack thinks, heart thudding hard and fast, roaring in his ears. _Jesus, he really believes that_. He opens his mouth to deny it, to de-escalate and calm Mac down, but Mac barrels on, shoulders heaving as he breaks Jack's heart more thoroughly than it's ever been broken before.

"I've already thought it, I couldn't even give you that. I've caused you so much trouble, put you through so much, and then I let- You _should_ hit me, Jack, just do it."

"No," Jack refutes, trying to reign in the force in his voice when all he wants to do is shout as loud as he can to get his point across, that never, ever is he going to just haul off and hit Mac. It was bad enough having this conversation with James, never mind Mac himself. "I'm not gonna hit you, kid."

"Why not? I deserve it." He's taken a step forward now, hands out at his sides like an invitation, a promise not to fight back, and Jack feels like he could be sick. "After what I thought, after I let him get into my head like that? I _deserve_ it."

Shaking his head, Jack repeats himself as steadily as he can manage through a throat that feels like it's almost closed completely, raw and painful, "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Just _do it_ ," Mac insists, loud and near-hysterical. It's terrifying to see him like this, so completely out of control, like he's given up on any hope of preserving Jack's opinion of him and is instead set on pushing until Jack really does snap and beat the hell out of him.

"Not going to happen," Jack says, his voice as soft as Mac's is wild and brash. He's got his own hands up now, a non-verbal reassurance, _it's okay, calm down, it's alright._

"Hit me, Jack!" With another step, Mac's hands come up to shove at Jack's chest, pushing him easily back so his legs collide with the couch when he offers no resistance. "What's it going to take for you to just _hit_ me?" His voice completely cracks on the last two words, breath petering into a hitched sob, hands trembling so hard Jack can feel it, where Mac's grabbed onto the front of his shirt.

"Nothing, son," Jack says, answering like it was the legitimate question he's afraid it was. "There is _nothing_ you could do that'd make me hurt you like that. Absolutely nothing." Taking a risk, he touches Mac's shoulder, palm curving lightly over the tense, shaking arm. In response, Mac gives one last, desperate shove, trying to achieve what, Jack doesn't know. "You can push me all day long, kiddo, I'm not gonna hit you, because it's not about you. It was never about anything you did. What James did to you, that's all on him, you hear me? All of it. Every single thing he ever did to you, there ain't one bit of it that can be blamed on _you_. I don't care what you did or didn't do or _thought_. "

Quickly enough that Jack almost doesn't realize it's happening, Mac slumps forward like a marionette whose strings saw a razor taken to them. Only fast instincts keep him from crumpling straight to the floor, Jack stooping a little to catch him and pull him up. He holds Mac tightly, arm curved protectively around him while his other hand cups over the back of Mac's head. Jack can feel something hot and damp against his collarbone, and it takes him a confused moment to realize what that means.

Mac is crying. He's crying, and suddenly his arms have come up as well, fingers disengaging from the front of Jack's shirt to dig into the back of it, gripping so hard it hurts. Jack makes a soft hushing sound, leaning his cheek against the top of Mac's head and hugging his kid close.

"Nothing you could do," he repeats, barely audible over the ragged, destroyed sound of the sobbing Mac seems to be trying to muffle in the fabric his face is pressed into. "Nothing you could _ever_ do that I'd hurt you for, son, I don't care what you've said or thought or anything. I'm not going to hit you. That was him, that was _all_ on him."

At least this time, if the choked almost-words coming from Mac are something as agonizing as 'I'm sorry', they're too lost in the long-penned in tears for Jack to tell.


	18. Chapter 18

Man, y'all, I don't even have a good excuse for disappearing on you like that for so heinously long. If anyone's still here reading this, thank you for sticking around, and I hope you enjoy this chapter of continued breakdown/processing.

There's gonna be one more chapter after this, and I swear up down and sideways it won't take months this time.

(Also, I'm toying around with the idea of doing a sequel, on a premise that'll be made clear in the last chapter, if anyone's interested in more of [gestures] whatever this is.)

(warnings: discussion of abuse, mac is not in a good place mentally/emotionally)

* * *

"Hit me, Jack!"

When the words come out of Mac's mouth, he has the more than half hysterical thought, one he's had more than once, that he doesn't know how he got here. He's standing in his living room, shouting at a man he _knows_ beyond a shadow of a doubt loves him fiercely, demanding that Jack hit him.

From the moment Jack came into the house, that Mac heard he and Riley speaking, Mac knew he was going to have to admit it. Despite how even thinking about admitting he'd been somehow afraid of Jack leaves Mac feeling like he's committed a crime for which he can't possibly ever be forgiven, he knows it's unavoidable. He knows this because he knows Jack, and he can see now how the next few minutes would go. It's too obvious he's leagues beyond upset, there's no way Jack would let it go or accept a brush-off. Jack would try and help, and there's no way Mac can bear the thought that Jack might try and comfort him, might hug him before he knows of the terrible betrayal that had occurred in Mac's mind.

So he'd done it. He'd tried to get Jack to leave, and when he wouldn't, Mac had blurted out loud the worst thing he could think of, an admission of the fact that there's a part of him he can't shut up that's been expecting Jack to beat the hell out of him. No behavior of Jack's has earned that, and in fact it's the very kindness Jack's treated him with that's landed them here now. The math is easy enough.

Jack's been behaving as a parent, acting like a father, and Mac has been, unconsciously or consciously, thinking of him like one for longer than he'd care to admit. And survival heuristics enabling a person to react to consistent threats mean that sometimes, by necessity, things get mis-categorized. Since James returned, 'father' has come to mean danger, has come to mean "you're acting unacceptably", "watch your mouth, Angus", "what's _wrong_ with you", has come to mean he's going to be hit. And since his brain has chosen to categorize 'Jack' somewhere in the realm of 'father', well.

Never mind that the justification James put forth, the explicit and implicit actions and attitude on Mac's part that earned him being shouted at, slapped across the face, it was all things he'd been doing around Jack for years, his own insufferable personality a constant, unbearable thorn in Jack's side, if James was to be believed. However badly James had treated him, if Mac's own behavior had justified it, it only followed that Jack was justified to do that much worse. He wouldn't. Mac knows he wouldn't. But still the thought had been there.

So here he is, trying to get his partner to hit him, to make up for thinking his partner _would_ hit him. Even Mac himself knows it's faulty logic, but he pushes at Jack's chest anyway, trying to provoke a reaction. He's hurt Jack, he knows he has, can see it in the man's eyes despite his carefully neutral expression. It's only fair that Mac hurts in return.

Jack doesn't take the bait, though. He moves back easily, no resistance whatsoever, and Mac feels worse.

"What's it going to take for you to just _hit_ me?" Mac's holding onto the front of Jack's shirt now, and he wants it to happen. He wants Jack to haul off and deck him, lay him out on the ground like he deserves. Maybe then some of this crushing, gutting guilt would melt away. But he doesn't. Jack looks at Mac like his heart's shredding and tells him 'nothing'. Jack tells him there's nothing he can do that'd get Jack to hurt him, lets Mac shove him again without fighting back at all, just touching his shoulder, warm and gentle. Calls him son, calls him kiddo, love and heartache in his voice, and it's too much.

"I don't care what you did or didn't do or _thought_ ," Jack says, and it's _too much._

When Mac's knees go out, when the clawed, fanged monster ravaging his chest finally snaps through the last piece of strength holding him up, Jack is there to catch him. Even after all of that, after Mac said what he did, tried so hard to get Jack to hit him, the man still caught him. Somehow, despite everything that's happened, everything James did and the interview with the Agency, this is what finally does it. Jack's arms tight around him, hands protective and steady, is what takes the last vestiges of his composure away.

When James hit him that first time, every subsequent time he was struck, when he was yelled at, when Mac was grabbed and shaken and slammed into a wall, when strangers had forced him to show his bruises for their camera while interrogating him and leaving him feel accused of something, not once had he cried. The ache behind his eyes is familiar, as is the tightness in his chest, but what's different is the tears. They actually come, this time, and once they start, they don't stop.

"Nothing you could do. Nothing you could ever do that I'd hurt you for, son, I don't care what you've said or thought or anything," Jack's voice says above his head, and Mac tries to quiet down, to get back control over himself, to stop this humiliating display.

It doesn't work, and the sobs don't stop their endless beat to escape his chest. There has to be something wrong with him, Mac thinks as he's barely able to breathe, that the abuse hadn't done it, none of the physical or emotional pain had been enough to break him down, but this had. James' violence, the callousness of Hill and Soloman, he'd stayed stone, stayed composed the whole time, but in the face of Jack's kindness, being held like what Jack is saying is true and it wasn't his fault… It's left Mac feeling like a little kid, embarrassed as all hell but helpless to stop the crying.

With his eyes squeezed shut and Jack's hold the only thing keeping him upright, Mac tries to apologize. He tries to say "I'm sorry", but the words are lost in Jack's shirt, his own uncontrollable gasps for air interrupting any intelligible syllables trying to make their way out. Eventually, he gives up and stops even trying to maintain his dignity, stops trying to speak, stops trying to reign any semblance of control of the situation. Control over himself and his reactions had been the only thing that held him together when James was controlling everything else. But this isn't James. It's Jack, and Mac doesn't need to protect himself anymore.

When he thinks back on it later, the thing Mac will be the most grateful for is the way, when he breaks, Jack just… lets him. For a long time, there are no more words. Jack just stands there and holds him, palm pressed to the back of his head, other arm tight around his back, swaying just a fraction. If Mac tries hard enough he can almost imagine he's a kid again, held by a different father than the one he'd actually had when he was still young enough that all this hurt could've been fixed before it was too deep to come clean. And Jack lets him, stands there with a grip that doesn't waver and a silent _it's okay, take your time, I'm here as long as you need._

Eventually, Mac pulls away. He clears his throat and takes several deep breaths, squeezing his eyes tight shut and then blinking rapidly.

"Mac?"

He looks at Jack, who's got a damp patch on his shirt he's ignoring completely and concern deeply lined into his face.

"I-" _I'm fine_ , dies before it makes it out of Mac's mouth, because he's pretty sure if he'd actually said something that ludicrous one or both of them may have started laughing, and that's all this day needs. Instead he shrugs helplessly and drops down onto the couch, exhaustion creeping into his bones like he's just run a marathon.

Mac's always hated crying. He hasn't ever done so especially frequently, and it always leaves him feeling hollowed out, head pounding with a stress and dehydration headache. Physical symptoms aren't the only thing left behind, either. Even when he'd been a kid, Mac always sat in the wake of any kind of crying jag embarrassed of himself and his lack of control, too old for this kind of behavior. He remembers being ten, after his dad left, alone in his and Bozer's treehouse, head pounding and cheeks wet, thinking angrily _you're too old for this kind of thing, Angus_ in a voice that sounded like James. Some decade and a half later, and it's still the same words, in the same voice, reminding him he's too old for this.

At least, if Jack thinks so, he's keeping that opinion to himself, standing next to the couch where Mac is sitting with his head in his hands.

"Okay," Jack says under his breath. It sounds like an afterthought, the kind of thing you mutter to yourself while you gather your wits about you, figure out what to do next. "Okay."

There's a brief touch to Mac's shoulder, and he's a little proud of the way he manages not to flinch. Footsteps sound as Jack walks away, and Mac is _not_ proud of the tiny pulse of hurt he feels, the way he wants to grab Jack's wrist, ask him to stay, ask him not to go, please, don't leave-

And then the footsteps are returning, and the couch dips when Jack sits down. Mac shakes his head, which throbs harder in response, and he's a little glad, because what else does he deserve after being so…

"Here," Jack says, before that thought can go any further or get any harsher. A glass of water is pressed into the back of one of Mac's hands and he takes it without looking over, fumbling around until his fingers grab onto the glass. "Drink that, breathe a minute."

Mac does as suggested, trying to focus on the the empty near-sweet taste of water when you're thirstier than you thought you were, the coldness of the glass, the warmth of Jack's hand on the back of his shoulder, steady and calm. He finishes the water quickly, then sits staring at the empty cup like the answer to what to say is in it somewhere.

When it'd been happening, Mac was sure nothing could be worse than what he'd done. He'd tried to get Jack- _Jack_ to _hit_ _him_ , and then he'd collapsed in Jack's arms and cried like he was five or something. However, now, sitting here in quiet with Jack's hand protective but not overbearing on his back, wondering what the hell to say after all of that… This is worse. Trying to find out how to move forward with that hanging over their head, oppressive and unavoidable, Mac just doesn't know how to do it. He doesn't know how he's ever going to look Jack in the face again. The only consolation is it was only Jack, that Bozer and Riley hadn't-

Oh, _shit_.

"Riley, she was here, where did she-"

"On the porch," Jack interrupts gently. "She went out when I got here. She's probably waiting for Bozer so she can catch him outside, give you some time to…" He can't seem to figure out how to end that sentence so it wanders into silence, and he finishes lamely, "To give you some time."

"I didn't mean to…" Mac is too distracted by his own unfinished sentence to worry about Jack's, about what Riley had been giving him time for. His mouth feels dry despite the water, and he wishes there was more of it, anything to keep his voice from cracking when he speaks again. "I didn't mean to kick her out, and it's Bozer's house too, he shouldn't have to… I didn't mean to make anyone have to _leave_."

"You didn't," Jack says firmly. "You didn't _make_ anyone feel like they _had_ to do anything, and if you think this is as far as they'd go for you, even _close_ to something they'd hold against you then you've got another think coming. Sitting out front for a while, giving you space when you need it so you can process? Shoot, of course they would."

"I didn't ask her to-"

"She didn't need askin'." There's a slight shift of the hand on his back, Jack's thumb stroking reassuringly over the crest of his shoulder blade. "She just did it, on account of she loves you."

 _She loves you_. The words sink in Mac's chest like lead, making his lungs feel hitched and tight again. His breathing catches and he clears his throat. He's not going to cry again. Not after earlier. But it's a near thing, and Jack notices. How could he not - he'd have felt the change in Mac's breath under his palm. And it's obvious he did, when his low, steady voice speaks again.

"Talk to me, kid. You got all kinds of hurt shut up in there. Might help if you let some of it out. Let me carry a little."

Mac honestly doesn't know how Jack does that, says things like that like they come so easily, offers solutions like it really is that simple, _talk to me_. And Mac wants to. He really does. He wants to do like he'd done on the back porch when Jack had told him to just repeat whatever James had said and go from there, spill out everything rocketing around inside his head, but it's somehow harder this time. They're his words, not James', and somehow that makes it worse.

"I don't know what to…" _What to say to explain any of this to you._ "How to…" _How to say it in a way that makes sense, when I know none of this is rational, but here it is anyway._

It's almost like Jack heard what he hadn't said, when he comes back with, "Don't worry about how, or if it makes sense. Just talk. It's just you and me here. They're good out there for a bit, it's just you and me, and you can say anything to me. You know that. You might need remindin', every now and then, but deep down, I know you know that."

Mac nods. It's an uneven, jerky movement, and he presses his hands over his face, trying to find level ground before he tries.

"I…" The words die in his throat and Mac clears it. Tries again. "You wouldn't... hurt me like that."

"You're right, I wouldn't," Jack agrees. "Not in a million years, not for any reason, not ever."

"And I know that. I _know_ that. But I still kept thinking you were going to." Mac shakes his head. Jack's hand remains resting on his shoulder, solid and lacking any hint of violence. "There's something wrong with me. There's something just, _deeply_ wrong in my head that I thought you could… I feel awful for, for implying you could- I feel _awful_."

"There's nothing wrong with your head, Mac," refutes Jack, still in that measured, warm voice. Mac hates that voice, if only because it makes him want to start crying again and he can't, not if he wants to get through this conversation. "The only bad thing in there is what he put there. He did that, it was all him."

"I've been walking around so…" The words are halting and awkward and Mac is frustrated with himself. He grits his teeth for a moment and swallows hard, then forces the rest of the sentence to come out, his voice harsher than he'd meant it to be, but it's the only way he can continue. And he _needs_ to continue, to get this out before it sinks into his chest and stays there, steeped too indelibly to ever come clean. "I've been walking around so _scared_ for just- for _weeks_. Of him, mostly, but also of, of _you_ , of people _moving too fast,_ of _everything_ , and I think he- He wanted me this way. I think he wanted me afraid because then I'd- I'd be too afraid to screw up."

To his credit, sitting on the couch beside him close enough that Mac can feel his muscles go tense for a moment, Jack doesn't curse, or jump up, or break anything. He takes a measured breath, another one, and when he talks, it's still with that same steady calm.

"Now I know you know this," he says, "and I know it doesn't need sayin', but I'm just gonna tell you anyway, that you don't ever gotta be scared of me." Before Mac can clear the lump in his throat to agree that rationally, with perspective, he does know this, Jack keeps going. "And anything else you're scared of, you come to me, to Matty, Riley, Boze, any of us, and we'll help you sort out what's gonna hurt you and what won't, okay? I can't do anything to go back and make sure your- make sure James didn't- At any rate, that I can do. We can do."

Instead of clearing, the lump seems to have grown, becoming difficult to breathe around. Mac knots his hands together in his lap and inhales through his nose, blowing air out through unsteady lips. He repeats this a few times, focusing on his own breath, on the weight of Jack's arm, constant and grounding around him.

"It's almost funny," he says after a while, stonily quiet, disgust, with himself and with James, bitter on his tongue. "He warned me, y'know?"

"He warned you," Jack repeats neutrally, without inflection or opinion. "Warned you about what, Mac?"

"When I asked, and he said he left to protect me, he said it wasn't from his job. Even if I didn't want to think about it then, I know he meant he left to protect me from him, the way he said it, there's nothing else he could've meant."

It's somehow easy to admit, after how long Mac spent denying it, refusing to believe his father would outright state that he'd been afraid of what he'd do to his son if he stayed, afraid of his own anger every time he looked at the child Mac had been. After everything that's happened though, the final confrontation with James, the bruises left on his body, on the wrists he's staring down at, the Agency's photographs, it's impossible to deny. James had known this was coming.

"He was admitting that I needed protecting from him, I think he knew he'd have hurt me if he'd stayed, and that's why he had to leave, but I guess I was old enough now to protect myself." Mac almost gives a half-shrug, but he selfishly doesn't want to disrupt Jack's hand, lest he remove it and Mac would lose that touch, that point of security. "Maybe those were my only options, he hurt me or he left. And this time he let me choose."

"Mac," Jack starts, but Mac's too much on a roll now, words coming easier and easier until he didn't think he could stop them if he tried.

"And I did. I had to _know_ what he was warning me about, and I chose, I wanted him to stay. And then when it- when it started, I had to- it was worth it, y'know? To have my dad, have a family. I figured it would be okay if it stayed like that. If it was only sometimes, if it never left a mark, I could handle it." A small, almost hysterical laugh bubbles up in his chest and Mac barely squashes it, clearing his throat for the umpteenth time today. "I thought I could handle it." His hands clench around each other just that much harder and his wrists ache, inflamed nerves reminding him of their presence.

"He wanted to fix me," Mac adds. One of his legs has started to twitch, jittering uncontrollably up and down without permission from his brain, bleeding chaotic, nervous energy out in the movement. "He told me he wanted to _teach_ me, that it wasn't my fault I hadn't turned out right, who could blame me when he wasn't around to teach me to be better, and he wanted to fix it now. He wanted to make me a better agent, a better son, a better person, _better_."

Mac gets the sense that Jack wants to argue but is holding back, letting him keep talking when there's obviously more he needs to say, more he needs to get out. And there is more. There's what he's been building to, the fear at the core of everything swirling around his mind.

"I thought maybe it'd work. That if I worked hard enough, if I changed, learned the way he wanted me to, he'd stop and just- just be my _dad_. But no matter what I did he just kept getting worse. I wasn't learning, no matter what he- What's wrong with me that my dad couldn't stand to be around me without hurting me?" He's not going to cry again. Mac is _not_ going to cry again, he insists to himself, raising his hands to grind the heels into his eyes. "Why wasn't I good enough?"

Evidently, that's the point at which Jack loses the ability to keep quiet.

"You're the smartest person I know, Mac," he says, which is an odd enough statement that it stops Mac's panic as it's rebuilding, arresting the escalation in its tracks.

"What?" Mac asks, voice thick.

"Let's just think about that for a second, put all those braincells to use." Jack's grip on him has tightened a bit and he's gone tense again, a thread of something pained in his voice belaying the calm reason he's going for. "You're good enough for me, you've always been good enough for me."

Something in Mac's chest pulses in an acute throb.

"And you're good enough for Bozer. You're good enough for Riley. You're good enough for Matty. And you're good enough for everyone you've ever saved, or helped, or worked with. You're the scientist here, but I know what outliers are. Looks to me like the only one who thinks there's something wrong with the way you are is him. And I think that says more about him than it does about you. Teach you, fix you, all of that's just bullshit. It's him there's something wrong with."

Wordless quiet lays over the room once more as what Jack's said soaks in. Mac's throat and chest ache and his head feels heavy. He leans to the side a bit, bumping into Jack, who shifts a little, supporting his weight without question. It's the most anyone's touched him in months, and Jack doesn't seem to think it's too much or more than Mac deserves, he just keeps being there, just keeps holding him. Like it's okay. Like Mac's got nothing to be ashamed of. Except he does, and he can't help but try and exorcise it, get rid of the weight of what he's been reduced to.

"I'm sorry I lied to you," Mac mumbles. He can feel Jack's shoulder move a little under his head, but his partner doesn't pull away. "About what was going on with, y'know. With him. And I'm sorry I hurt you."

"Hurt me?"

"I tried to get you to hit me, Jack." It's hard to even say, hard to recall without flinching at the memory. "I know you, I know that hurt you."

"Yeah," Jack admits. "It hurt. But that was him, that wasn't you. Everything about this that hurts, and there's a lot, it's all on him. None of it's on you. Okay?"

Mac hums a little, and it's the closest to saying 'okay' that he can get. The thought does float through his mind though, as Jack sits there letting it all sink in, exist in the air without a joke to diffuse it, without shying away from all that's fallen on them.

 _Maybe he's right. Maybe none of it was about me at all._


	19. Chapter 19

Thank you all so much for sticking with me through all of this. I have a whole long winded explanation of where I've been for several months, but I think we'd all rather i just get to the part we've all been waiting for - the end of 'This Trophy Isn't Real Love'.

Thank you for reading this labor of love of mine, and for your lovely support and comments. Stick around to leave one more if you'd like, and keep an eye out, I might not be totally done with this world yet.

There's a line in here about Murdoc - you'll know it when you see it - that is where my idea for a possible follow-up story could be. I can't seem to shake the thought.

(usual warnings apply but there's no additional rough content we haven't encountered before)

* * *

A wordless quiet, too thick to be peaceful but at least something resembling calm, has settled over the room. Mac's body feels weighed down, his head heavy where it rests against Jack's chest. He knows he's going to have to move eventually. At some point, he will have to break out of this bubble of space and time where, if just for now, none of it was his fault and nobody blamed him, back into a world where he can't quite bring himself to believe that, and probably won't for a long, long time. At some point he's going to have to sit up straight and step out of the protective circle of Jack's arms and into a world that isn't safe, or kind, or free of blame.

At some point he's going to have to remember that _Bozer and Riley are still out on the porch_ and he's being a _self absorbed jackass_.

"Ah, _damn_ ," Mac groans, turning his head to the side, half his face now hidden against Jack's shirt.

"What? What's wrong?" There's a note of alarm in Jack's voice and Mac feels his body stiffen in preparation for whatever terrible new twist he seems sure has now popped up.

As awful as it is that they've reached a point where the slightest sign of distress has Jack worried - with legitimate reason - that some other piece of life-alteringly terrible news is about to crash down on him, Mac is surprised to find that he feels compelled to laugh. A warm burst of affection seizes his lungs and he almost laughs out loud, because it's such a _Jack_ response. Just as quickly, though, he sobers and sits up, reluctantly pulling out of the sheltering embrace.

"Riley and Bozer, they're still outside. We should go get them, it's not fair to leave them out there."

"We've talked about this, they don't care." Jack's hand moves as he speaks, thoughtlessly giving Mac's shoulder a tiny shake as if emphasizing a point he thought he'd made already. It's a strange pair of warring instincts that have Mac swallowing hard and fighting both the urge to duck back against Jack's chest, and to jerk out of his grip before it could turn violent.

Frustrated with himself - they've been over this, it's not going to turn violent and it never will, if only his brain could catch up with this information - Mac forces his body to cooperate and rises from the couch.

"No, it's time," he says, looking over towards the door. And it is. Time. Sooner or later, they'll have to come back inside and life will have to creak and grind back into the pace of reality, and it may as well be sooner.

Jack follows him on the way to the door, and Mac spends the short walk from the living room to the front hallway talking himself into believing not even that everything was going to be okay, but that everything was going to continue to be . That he would open the door, and Riley and Bozer would be there, and they would have dinner together, and after he went to bed that night, the sun would rise again the next morning. Something terrible has happened, and the world will keep turning anyway. There's video out there somewhere of-

Video. There's video.

Maybe ten, fifteen feet from the door, Mac stops dead in his tracks. His hand shoots out, grabbing onto Jack's wrist and stopping him too. At first he doesn't say anything, just stands in the hall with his fingers digging into Jack's arm, searching for his bearings, and once again, Jack just lets him.

"There's video," is all that eventually comes out. It tastes like ash to say. "Jack, there's video, of- of-"

"I know," Jack is quick to respond, and it sends a rush of ice down Mac's spine.

It was one thing to tell him what happened, to put in his own words what he had suffered at James' hands, but the idea that Jack had seen it, had watched what transpired in that house, lives now with those images and words in his head exactly as they had happened, it makes Mac feel sick. And Jack must read this sickness in his face, because he's quick to continue.

"I haven't seen it," he says, answering the question Mac hadn't yet been able to ask. "I promise. Matty's seen it, but she's the only one. Nobody else is going to see any of it."

Mac only has a moment to sit in the relief of it, to hold onto the knowledge that whatever was on those tapes - _everything_ that was on those tapes - Jack hadn't seen any of it. Because that was only part of the reason he'd stopped them both before they could reach the door. Jack's knowledge of the tapes was only a fraction of the fear that had spiked when Mac had remembered them. There was something else, too. Something worse that, once it had occurred to him, rang loud as a klaxon siren, over and over in his head.

"What if someone _does_ see it." His hand is still on Jack's arm, hanging onto him like the grip will impress upon Jack the seriousness of the matter.

"Nobody's gonna, I-"

"No, listen," Mac says, cutting Jack off mid-sentence and too caught up in the possibility of what could happen to feel bad about it. " _Listen_. It could happen. Somebody could see it. You've been doing what we do for way too long _not_ to know that. Once a video- a video _like_ that exists we can't _ever_ guarantee someone won't get ahold of it. What if someone does? What if someone- someone like-" The name catches and sticks, and Mac clears his throat, consciously loosening his fingers in their tight grasp on Jack's wrist. The last thing he wants to do is hurt Jack, leave marks on him like the ones coloring Mac's own skin. "What if someone like Murdoc gets ahold of those tapes?"

The mention of Murdoc makes Jack's entire expression go tense, but his resolve doesn't seem to shake.

"Then we'll handle it," Jack says with a sense of calm fortitude that has always amazed and baffled Mac in equal measure. "If, if anyone, Murdoc, _anyone_ , ever gets ahold of any of this - and that's a _huge_ if, given barely anybody knows they exist, then we will handle it. We'll figure out what to do and we'll handle it together. As a family. Okay?"

Mac nods, and evidently that's not enough of a reassurance, because Jack repeats, a little more firm and a little louder, "Okay?"

"Okay." Squeezing Jack's arm once in a nonverbal 'thank you', Mac forces himself then to let go and turn back to the door. The last thing he had to say has been said, the last lingering fear raised, and all there is left to do is open the door and let the rest of his life rush back in.

There's a quiet, fierce determination in the way the people in his house move about the kitchen and living room, Jack and Bozer and Riley. They make dinner with a quiet dedication to building strength and safety and normal around him that is the same as the dedication they bring to a mission. They approach reminding him that the rest of his life is still here, isn't going anywhere, the same way they approach to saving lives, and Mac loves them for it. He looks around at his family and what they're doing, and feels his bruised heart pulse with an ache the same as the one in his split lip when he purses his mouth to stall the tremble in his jaw.

When Matty shows up, they don't really talk about it. There isn't any indication of who called her, or if she'd been called at all, perhaps instead either sensing her presence would be helpful or needing to verify for herself that everyone is still in one piece. Either way, Bozer lets her in the front door and waves her into the living room, where she walks up to where Mac sits on the couch. She looks at him with a shrewd eye for a long moment then pulls him forward into a hug, squeezing him tight then looking him sternly in the face.

"I'm proud of you," she says, and Mac nods and looks away. He can't answer, not out loud, but he appreciates it anyway.

Something in Mac changes as the evening goes on. It's not any of the changes Matty would've predicted would come. He doesn't withdraw into himself, shrinking away from the people and the sound. Shuttering. And he doesn't ease much either, go in the opposite direction to bright laughter and the open posture of a person who feels completely safe in their environment. She frowns and shifts in her place on the couch, watching him closely and trying to place what he's seeing. Mac's face, as he listens to his friends talk around him, keeps changing in small ways, the tightening of a frown, the flicker of his eyes around the room like he's trying to solve a puzzle using its contents. In his lap, his hands twitch, fingers twisting at nothing. He looks distracted, and more than that, he looks focused.

It's a look Matty has seen on him before.

"What's going on?" she asks, when there's a spare moment in which a dinner emergency summons Riley, Bozer, and Jack away from the living room. "That's your thinking face. I know that face, it's the one you always make right before you pull some ridiculous stunt I don't like."

The corner of Mac's mouth twitches into a smile, but it's gone as soon as it appeared, fading back into that pensive, calculating look.

"You're right," he says eventually. "You're probably not going to like this."

"Like what." The flat question is delivered without any indication of the acute worry Matty finds herself experiencing at that admission. On a normal day, before all of this, it would've been a concerning thing to hear from Mac. This, though, is not a normal day, and since James, the possibilities for what could be wrong have expanded so far outside of mission relate danger. The problem could be anything.

"I can't stop thinking about it. The mission."

Okay. Not what Matty would've predicted, but she can work with this.

"It was real," Mac continues. He's looking down at his fiddling hands, fingers moving around a phantom paperclip, twisting at metal that isn't there. "The assignment was fake, but the problem was real, and those people are still in real danger. I feel like I have to do something."

"You don't," she replies instantly. "Nothing about that mission is your responsibility. James may have roped you into it under everybody's radar, may have used it as a bizarre tool to try and force you into working with the Agency, but no matter what he said to you, nothing about that mission is yours. You don't ever have to think about it again."

He doesn't look like he believes her, and when he speaks, it's obvious he doesn't.

"But it _is_ my responsibility," insists Mac. He's looking at her now, earnest and deadly serious about what he's saying. "I spent weeks poring over those files, studying the exit strategies, the problems they kept running into. It's dangerous, and they were coming at it all wrong, and I have this terrible feeling that if I don't say something, somebody is going to die. Maybe a lot of people. I had it figured out, I really did. I don't know. I can't just do nothing, Matty, not when it's all right there in my head."

"Well, they can't have you, that's for sure. Not after what they pulled in that interview."

Mac looks away sharply, and Matty almost regrets bringing it up. Almost. Not if it'll keep him from doing something reckless while not thinking straight.

"I can't just do nothing," he repeats in a low mutter.

"I'm not saying do nothing. What I'm saying is," Matty tells him, coming up with the plan as she speaks, "we're going to write them a brief. They've got their obsession with security, fine, let them have it. You'll write them a brief and I'll watch you write it and then sign it, and that'll have to be good enough for them. My word, as Director of the Phoenix Foundation, is going to have to be good enough. Okay?"

"Okay."

While Mac gets situated at his desk, hunting down the paper and pen writing supplies barely ever used for communication in this digital age, Matty explains what's going on to Jack, Bozer, and Riley. None of them are happy about it, Jack's face pretty successfully imitating thunderclouds rolling in while Bozer sputters through several protests and Riley just stares blankly. She doesn't have much to say that will reassure them, because she doesn't feel very reassured herself. In the end, they don't fight her too hard on it, sensing a lost cause when they see one, and she's left to walk back into Mac's room to supervise the writing of the brief.

It's the second time she's watched over him like this, and watching Mac write the brief doesn't feel wholly dissimilar to standing guard during what the Agency had the audacity to call an 'interview'. She stands just inside the door, leaning back against it and watching Mac write with the same intensity he has approaching any problem he chooses to tackle. He seems to change his mind about something a few times, grabbing a fresh sheet of paper out of a notebook half filled with equations Matty would have no hope of understanding.

"I wish I could talk to Riley." It's the first thing he's said while he's been writing the brief. "I kept telling him when we got to this bit, we needed Riley. But the Agency, y'know. I can't put that on her, I can't make her lie to them about being involved, and I can't make you lie to them either. It's just… it's frustrating, is all."

"I get that," Matty says, quietly agreeing when what she really wants to do is lean around the door and holler for Riley to come help, damn the rules and damn lying to the Agency.

Whatever respect she may have had for them and their rules, their strict adherence to policy and procedure, it's gone now, after what Hill and Soloman had put him through. Mac, though, he still has her respect, in spades, and if he wants to abide by the Agency's policies, then she'll go along with that. For him, she'll stand here in this doorway, so that when she signs a piece of paper saying sensitive Agency information was seen by no other eyes, it will be the truth, and there will be no more 'interviews' and no more accusations.

It feels like Mac and Matty have been gone for a long time, though Jack knows it's only been a few minutes. He's grown too restless to just stand around waiting for Mac to finish this last piece of work for the Agency - work he can't possibly be expected to do, though Jack understands his need to do it - and is now in the kitchen, standing by the stove and stirring a pot. In the next room over, Riley and Bozer are working on a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, while he makes a fruit sauce to go with his mother's fruit dumpling recipe. All of them had needed something to do with their hands, and while Riley and Bozer opted for the puzzle, Jack had poked around until he found the necessary ingredients for what had been, during his childhood, the ultimate comfort food.

He's just finished with the sauce when Matty comes back in, a sealed envelope tucked into her bag, and announces that Mac has finished the brief. Jack nods, his face asking the question plainly even if he can't quite get his vocal cords in working order yet.

"He's hanging in there," Matty says, matter-of-fact and without any kind of sugar coat. "But it's rough. That was hard for him."

"Thanks," manages Jack. He sets the pot on the counter to cool and heads down the hall.

Mac is sitting alone in his room with the desk light on, focused on an empty desktop where the brief letter had sat while he wrote it. The pen still sits in his hand, twiddling idly in fingers attempting to bleed out some anxious energy. His eyes are reddened and it's clear he's been fighting a losing battle against tears.

"Hey," Jack says quietly, walking over and leaning back against the desk next to where Mac sits. Mac returns the greeting with a small smile, then looks quickly away, hand going up to hide his face as he scrubs it dry again.

"You did a good job, today, doing what you did for those people. You didn't have to do that." Jack waits for a moment before continuing, gathering his bearings and making sure he can speak clearly around the lump in his throat. "I'm proud of you."

"Matty said that earlier." Mac's voice is thick and distant and he won't look Jack in the face. "That she was proud of me. I… I guess I'm not seeing it. What it is you guys are finding that you're so proud of. All I can see is a dumb kid crying at a table cause he had to write a letter."

"That's not what I'm seeing at all," Jack tells him. He wraps a palm around the back of Mac's neck, drawing the kid's gaze up to his to tell him insistently, "I see somebody who's done things and lived through things not a lot of people could've made it out the other end of and still found time to ask 'what about the people in this awful organization who could still be in danger'. That's a kind of grace not a lot of people've got, son, and I'm proud you've got it in you."

Jack pulls him forward, pressing a kiss to the crown of Mac's head, before releasing him and clearing his throat.

"Come on, now," he says, voice rough. "I made momma's fruit dumplings, you don't wanna miss that."

Since Jack had made the dessert, the three younger agents had insisted on being the ones to clean up. Jack has been relegated to the living room with Matty, working on the jigsaw puzzle left discarded and half complete. He's enjoying listening to them work together, voices low but happy, and everything feels like it's settling.

A loud sound, a dish clattering abruptly back into the sink causes Jack to bolt to his feet, head whipping around and searching instantly for danger. There is none to be found, just Riley standing there looking shocked, water and soap spattered across her face and shirt. Bozer is breathless and wheezing against the counter, unable to so much as get a word out past his overwhelming amusement.

Another sound draws Jack's attention. It's a sound he hasn't heard in a long time, and he looks to the side and there is Mac, dropped into a chair with a hand pressed to his shaking chest. There's a crinkled-eyed smile spread wide across his face, and Jack feels something in his chest simultaneously break and mend.

Mac is laughing.


End file.
